ESSAYS 
IN CRITICISM 

THIRD SERIES 
BY 

MATTHEW ARNOLD 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN 



BOSTON 

THE BALL PUBLISHING CO. 

1910 






INTRODUCTION 

Copyright 1910, by 

THE BALL PUBLISHING COMPANY 



CIA:^?1074 



CONTENTS 

Introduction 5 

On the Modern Element in Literature 35 

Dante and Beatrice 87 

Obermann Ill 

Sainte-Beuve 137 

Eenan 153 

Johnson's Lives 183 

A ^'Friend of God'' 223 

An Eton Boy 249 



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Matthew Arnold published the first series 
of his Essays in Criticism in 1865. He died 
in 1888. A few months later, a second se- 
ries of Essays in Criticism was published. 
Between the issue of these two series a genera- 
tion elapsed. Now, in 1910, a third and last 
series of Essays in Criticism, appears, after an 
equal lapse of time. 

Of the high critical value of these essays, 
Time has been the best and kindest judge. 
To us, as we read them to-day, such essays as 
those On the Modern Element in Literature 
and on Oherr/iann have an abiding and pro- 
phetic truth which raises them at once to the 
plane of classic criticism. To become classic, 
criticism must hold a flawless mirror up to na- 
ture, and interpret adequately what that mir- 
ror reflects. Judged by this standard, the 
third series of Essays in Criticism suffers no 
diminution by comparison with its predeces- 
sors. In fact, we may surely claim that the 
essay which opens the volume ranks higher 
5 



6 INTEODUCTION 

than any which have preceded it, since its 
sympathy and its voice are alike universal in 
their truth. Matthew Arnold's modesty for 
a long time prevented its publication, but, at 
last, after twelve years, he reprinted it in 
Macmillan's Magazine with an interesting 
prefatory note. 

The essay On the Modern Element of Lit- 
erature , he says, ''was delivered as an in- 
augural lecture in the Poetry Chair at Oxford. 
It was never printed, but there appeared at 
the time several comments on it from critics 
who had either heard it, or heard reports 
about it. It was meant to be followed and 
completed by a course of lectures developing 
the subject entirely, and some of these were 
given. But the course was broken off because I 
found my knowledge insufficient for treating 
in a solid way many portions of the subject 
chosen. The inaugural lecture, however, 
treating a portion of the subject where my 
knowledge was perhaps less insufficient, and 
where besides my hearers were better able to 
help themselves out from their own knowledge, 
is here printed. No one feels the imperfection 
of this sketchy and generalizing mode of treat- 
ment, less to my taste now than it was eleven 
years ago, but the style too, which is that of 
the doctor rather than the explorer, is a style 



INTEODUCTION 7 

whieh I have long since learnt to abandon. 
Nevertheless, having written much of late 
about Hellenism and Hebraism, and Hellen- 
ism being to many people almost an empty 
name compared with Hebraism, I print this 
lecture with the hope that it may serve, in the 
absence of other and fuller illustrations, to 
give some notion of the Hellenic spirit and its 
works, and of their significance in the history 
of the evolution of the human spirit in gen- 
eral/' 

These words are a pleasing reflection of 
Arnold's personality, but two generations 
have proven his instinct to have been false. 
The essay has passed successfully through a 
long probation, and Time at last claims toll. 

The three essays on Obermann, Benan, and 
Sainte-Beuve are, each, significant mile-stones 
of interpretation, and two generations have 
preserved their freshness likewise unimpaired. 
Each carries its message to us to-day, and each 
reflects most clearly the spirit of its subject. 
Of the other essays included in the volume, 
we may say that they fully sustain the repu- 
tation of Matthew Arnold as one of the few 
world-critics whose work will stand the endur- 
ing test of Time. 

The publication of a third series of Ar- 
nold's Essays in Criticism offers a most fitting 



8 INTEODUCTION 

opportunity to pause and test the value and 
validity of contemporary criticism, to lay it 
unobtrusively by the side of Arnold's critical 
contribution, and, looking at it in the spirit 
of the age, to hazard a forecast of the future. 

Of this opportunity I have endeavoured to 
take advantage, and if the point of view 
which I voice should, at first, seem novel, be- 
lieve that in truth it is as old as Plato and 
that it can point to high exemplars in the past 
and present of its theory and practice. Let 
us keep Arnold present in our minds as an 
element of our thought, but regard him as 
a voice crying in the wilderness, uttering 
many wise words, which are true when sepa- 
rated from his personality, but now and then 
unsafe when guided by his pleading heart and 
tongue. For much of what we say, he has 
been the precursor, and we owe him an in- 
calculable debt for starting the critical im- 
pulse, but he falls short of our ideal in some 
respects, and occasionally, though seldom, he 
is antagonistic to it. 

Briefly, the ideal is this : that criticism shall 
consist in the identification, as far as possible, 
of the critic with the man whom he criticises, 
and in the interpretation of the latter 's soul 
by the critic in terms of imaginative, that is 
to say, poetic truth. Since the human race 



INTRODUCTION ' 9 

is progressing steadily, and since the line of 
progress lies along the road of sympathy, I 
think that we may do more than hope : we may 
predict what the nature of criticism in the fu- 
ture will be. 

First of all, therefore, we may say that the 
new criticism will be sympathetic, for this 
will be essential, if it is to interpret. ''How 
can a writer adequately interpret the activity 
of his age when he is not in sympathy with 
it ? " exclaims Arnold in his essay On the Mod- 
ern Element in Literature. Yet lack of sym- 
pathy is our vice, the one great weakness 
which we have to combat. Lately, the London 
Times has been bewailing the lack of sym- 
pathy to be found in modern drama, and 
a few sentences from its complaint may have 
their fitness here. ''Most modern writers 
seem to be reporting upon life as if it were 
a piece of machinery; and their report is to 
the effect that it was badly designed from the 
first, and has long been utterly out of repair. 
. . . Our modern writers . . . rub 
the gilt off the gingerbread from a sense of 
duty, and then tell us that the gingerbread 
is not worth eating. They exhort us to see 
things as they are and then represent them 
as not worth seeing. They tear the veil away 
only to show that there is nothing behind it. 



10 INTEODUCTION 

'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we 
die.' That is the true moral to be drawn 
from much of our serious art; and it is little 
wonder that many draw it and prefer musical 
comedy. ' ' 

The criticism of to-day only too frequently 
applies the same point of view to literature, 
forgetting that books are not corpses, nor 
criticism a dissecting-room. If the litera- 
ture of our day is to be mainly criticism, as 
for a time it must be, apart from the devel- 
opment of the short-story, let it be, in Ar- 
nold's phrase, ''a criticism of life," and not, 
according to the naturalist's point of view, a 
criticism of death. The criticism of the fu- 
ture will revolt from this latter ideal, which 
would define the critic's office as an analysis 
of death, and will substitute for this defini- 
tion the true one — that criticism is rather a 
synthesis of life. "When called upon to 
choose between poetry and pathology, it will 
not find it difficult to make a final decision. 

The new criticism will take little account 
of bodies: it will rather care mainly for souls. 
Arnold has taught us by example, if not in 
theory, that personality is almost of para- 
mount importance as the interpreter of a 
man's thought and message. Therefore the 
new criticism will seek personality first of all. 



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Environment will be held as a topic of little 
importance for investigation, but the spirit- 
ual essence of the man will be held of much, 
I may say, chief, value. This being true, 
the criticism of the future will follow Ar- 
nold's example, and view with disfavour and 
suspicion any over-serious attempt to base 
literary criticism upon the laws of history, 
heredity, or physiological psychology. It will 
not overlook the value of such laws, but the 
study of them will be kept wholly subsidiary 
to the critical appreciation of spiritual beauty. 
The future critic will pay little attention 
to the so-called ^'higher criticism.' ' Rather 
will he concern himself with the exercise of 
the inner criticism — the criticism of life, 
which is based on the complete identification 
of critic and subject. In the true sense of 
the word, such criticism will be impression- 
istic, but the impression recorded will be 
based on a sound foundation of critical eth- 
ics. This ethical standard will save it from 
being spasmodic or crude, quite as much as 
its impressionistic method will rescue it from 
the danger of pedantry and an excessively 
academic standard. This assumption of im- 
pressionism does not imply that the criticism 
of the future will be, to employ Mr. Brown- 
ell 's piquant phrase, an ' ' irresponsible exercise 



12 INTEODUCTION 

of the nervous system. ' ' It will be nervous, I 
grant you, if by nervous you mean sensitive 
in feeling and expression, but it will be lucid 
in its reasoning, following, somewhat cau- 
tiously however, Arnold as a guide. It will 
assume that an attitude of detachment on the 
critic 's part implies a totally erroneous theory 
of criticism, and it will keep in mind the fact 
that Arnold himself is at his best, when he 
forgets his own identity, and enters wholly 
into the spirit of his subject. In criticism, 
as in life, since loth are quests, you must lose 
yourself to find yourself. 

Complete identification implies possession 
of all the theological virtues. The criticism 
of the future will value highly faith and hope, 
for it will be founded upon them, but it will 
be particularly careful not to forget charity. 
Good taste will remind the critic of this duty, 
and also warn him not to strive after effect 
for effect's sake. The new criticism will not 
ignore, to be sure, the frequent value and sal- 
utary influence of paradox. Far from it. 
But it will never sacrifice soul to form, nor 
surrender, under any circumstances, sense to 
sound. 

Taking care not to overestimate the im- 
portance of technique in his own work, the 
future critic will make a consideration of 



INTRODUCTION 13 

it in his subject subordinate to his efforts at 
reaching the heart and soul of the man he 
is studying. He will remember that the man 
who criticises form only, and, finding the 
form bad, wholly condemns the work, is es- 
sentially disproportionate and uncritical in 
his mental outlook. Curiously enough, Ar- 
nold has been severely accused of this very 
fault by no less a critic than Richard Holt 
Hutton. ''Read," says he, ''his five lectures 
on translating Homer, and observe how ex- 
clusively the critic's mind is occupied with 
the form as distinguished from the substance 
of the Homeric poetry. Even when he con- 
cerns himself with the greatest modern poets 
. . . it is always the style and superficial 
doctrine of their poetry, not the individual 
character and unique genius which occupy 
him." "Superficial doctrine" is delicious. 
The critic of the future will take warning, 
and not sin through over-confidence. 

The new criticism will be simple, searching, 
and salutary. Avoiding metaphysical en- 
tanglements, it will rely on intuition only 
so far as that intuition finds its justifica- 
tion in already established truth. It will 
therefore be based on tradition and sanc- 
tion. Its motto will be faith and its 
watchword romance. It will not he proud 



14 INTEODUCTION 

and analyse truth: rather will it he hwm- 
hle and seek truth. The fact is that con- 
temporary criticism has fallen into a partial 
pathetic fallacy. Identifying itself to a 
greater or less degree with science, it scorns 
romance and faith, forgetting that faith and 
romance are the progenitors of science, that 
Columbus and Bacon, and others such as they, 
who followed the great quest of life as the 
critic should follow the great quest of souls, 
were wholly animated by these two aspects 
of truth which are really one, and that it is 
because they saw a wonderful and seemingly 
impossible vision, and because seeing it they 
believed, that their achievement has made 
modern science possible. 

We are apt to forget the existence of truth 
in our midst, and seeking wildly after it far 
afield, to fail entirely in our quest. This is 
to be one message of criticism in the future. 
We are indeed already beginning to hear it 
voiced, and already there are many signs of 
the second spring. Nowhere has the truth 
been more clearly and searchingly pointed 
out than by a young American poet of high 
gifts and high accomplishment, Mr. William 
Stanley Braithwaite. Sandy ^ Star, printed 
last year in the Atlantic Monthly, conveys a 
great message to our generation. 



INTRODUCTION 15 

"No more from out the sunset. 
No more across the foam. 
No more across the windy hills 
Will Sandy Star come home. 

"He went away to search it 

With a curse upon his tongue: 
And in his hands the staff of life. 
Made music as it swung. 

"I wonder if he found it 

And knows the mystery now — 
Our Sandy Star who went away. 
With the secret on his brow." 

The new criticism will therefore be intro- 
spective in its search for truth. It will live 
neither in the past, nor in the future, but 
in the present. Living in the present, it will 
not criticise, in the commonly accepted sense 
of the word: rather will it appreciate. In 
other words, it will seek for beauty and not 
for imperfection. Since the ideal critic must 
be tolerant, he will not be excessively fas- 
tidious. No man can unite both qualities. 
Arnold endeavoured to do so, and failed. To 
be sure, the future critic will cultivate dis- 
cretion, but he will not carry this discretion 
to the point of timidity. 

The new criticism, seeking beauty only, 
will be positive, and not negative. As a 



16 INTEODUCTION 

corollary to this, it will perceive the true 
meaning of freedom. The future criticism 
will not confound lubricity (I use the word in 
a somewhat pleasant sense) with lucidity, nor 
well-oiled machinery with a clear-flowing cur- 
rent, nor again, on the other hand, will it 
mistake anarchy for freedom. It will recog- 
nise that to be free it is simply necessary to 
unmanacle the limbs, and that to eliminate 
the surroundings of life and life 's atmosphere, 
as Nietzsche and certain of his critical disci- 
ples have done, is simply to substitute new 
bonds for old. 

Realising this somewhat elementary truth, 
the criticism of the future will study before 
it teaches; and will take little for granted. 
Since its fundamental object is constructive, 
it will feel the necessity of ascertaining be- 
yond the shadow of a doubt that its founda- 
tion is secure, and will recognise that we are 
yet children in our apprehension of spiritual 
truth. In a new and truer sense of the word, 
it will be inductive on the grand scale, and 
each new critical revelation of its masters 
will serve as an additional contribution to the 
body of our spiritual insight. 

The criticism of the future will, above all 
else, teach, and the spirit of its teachers will 
be one of humility and not of pride. Pride 



INTEODUCTION 17 

is the vice of critics, and it usually takes 
the form of excessive urbanity. The new 
criticism, therefore, in its anxiety to avoid the 
reproach of provinciality will not fall into 
the greater fault of excessive urbanity or 
civility. The moments when Matthew Arnold 
is most provincial are the very moments when 
he endeavours consciously to be urbane. 
Such urbanity savours much of the calcium- 
light when practised by lesser craftsmen than 
Arnold. For such as these, there are more 
effective means of illumination. 

One of these, — perhaps the most effective, 
— ^is a sense of humour. The new criticism 
will bear in mind Arnold's utterance in his 
lecture On the Modern Element in Literature: 
— ''There is a comic side from which to re- 
gard humanity as well as a tragic one." It 
will be genial and fresh in its outlook, and 
will value highly a sense of humour, knowing 
that without such a gift, no man, much less a 
critic, can be quite catholic. 

This sense of humour will carry with it, 
and perhaps dictate, an instinct for propor- 
tion, not unmingled with proper dignity. At 
present, there are two kinds of critics who 
consider their opportunity for critical ex- 
pression in two respectively different ways. 
One class looks upon the exercise of the crit- 



18 INTEODUCTION 

ical faculty as a barren heath for him to wan- 
der on whithersoever he wills: the other as a 
road leading to a definite goal whither he 
proposes to conduct his readers. The crit- 
icism of the future will recognise that the 
former has no excuse for being, and that the 
latter outlook only can make for idealistic 
criticism. 

The manner of the new criticism will be 
confident, but not self-willed, either in this 
or in other respects. A sense of proportion 
should cause the future critic to feel neither 
superior nor inferior to his subject. Rather 
should he approach it as nearly on an equal 
plane as possible, for otherwise he will fail 
in that identification which he seeks. Henry 
James in Views and Reviews mentions as Ar- 
nold's chief merit the fact that he stands on 
high ground. That he stands on high ground 
is true, and admirable when he voices general 
principles, but now and then, though fortu- 
nately not often, the ground of his criticism 
is so high that it dwarfs his subject, and he 
declaims to the atmosphere alone. Lucidity 
under these conditions is hardly desirable. 

The fact is that Arnold is a reformer be- 
fore he is a critic, and that this narrows his 
outlook. No reformer has ever had or can 
ever have the wide impartial critical mind, 



INTEODUCTION 19 

which *'sees life steadily and sees it whole. '^ 
He is eaten up by the zeal of his task, and 
he lives detached days. A man may, none 
the less, be greater as a reformer than as a 
critic, if he is whole-hearted and not too sane. 
Matthew Arnold just fell short of universal 
critical greatness, and the cause of his limita- 
tion was the very lucidity which he valued so 
highly and sought so earnestly. The new 
criticism will therefore not be too eager to 
reform, nor, remembering Arnold's example, 
will it be obtrusively didactic. 

Keeping ever before him the ideal of identi- 
fication, the future critic will not sneer but 
sympathise. His sympathy will be founded 
upon faith in men, and he will study men be- 
cause of this faith that is in him. He will not 
study, therefore, objectively. He will study 
subjectively, knowing that the kingdom of 
God is within. He will therefore treat as sec- 
ondary the consideration of literary polish 
on the part of his subject, though he will by 
no means ignore it as an element of beauty. 
The critic's first and chief office, however, will 
he to go directly with keen penetration to 
the core and soul of the thought and the 
man. 

This is his mission in life, — to seek, find, 
interpret, and apply. His criticism will there- 



20 INTEODUCTION 

fore be warm and imaginative, rather than 
cold and reminiscent of the laboratory. 

Curiously enough, Arnold's most direct in- 
fluence here in America has been on men who 
have lacked creative imagination. If one 
were asked who, he thought, would be most 
likely to be influenced by Matthew Arnold's 
criticism and literary style, he would be apt 
to mention such men as Professor Woodberry 
and Professor Santayana. Certainly the 
names of President Eliot and Professor Wen- 
dell would never occur to him, for Arnold is 
essentially imaginative. These men, to be 
sure, are often fanciful, but the criticism of 
the future will demand imagination. Its 
practitioners, having a clear eye and a sure 
touch, will be responsible to themselves and 
to their audience, and will be eminently sane 
and normal. The criticism of the future will 
not illustrate and comment: it will express. 
Discarding realism, it will substitute idealism, 
perceiving clearly that the realist does not 
realise, 'but merely analyses, and that it is left 
to the idealist alone to realise and express. 

Arnold has defined criticism as "a disin- 
terested endeavour to learn and propagate the 
best that is known and thought in the world. ' ' 
Under the rule of the new criticism, the true 
higher criticism, this definition will practi- 



INTEODUCTION 21 

cally stand. One little change in wording 
there will be. For disinterested, we are learn- 
ing to substitute the word interested, knowing 
that greater than all the rest is the gift pecul- 
iar to St. Paul, the gift of vital spiritual sym- 
pathy; in other words, the gift of identifica- 
tion. 

Do not misunderstand me. This does not 
mean that we must be completely satisfied with 
the subject of our criticism. On the con- 
trary, the great virtue in the criticism of 
given works is, in Arnold's words, "to be 
perpetually dissatisfied with these works, 
while they perpetually fall short of a high 
and perfect ideal." This is the very spirit 
of the rule. Let us identify ourselves so 
completely with the artist that we feel with 
him and in his spirit, his own sense of limita- 
tion, that we communicate our sympathetic 
and cooperative stimulus to him, not only en- 
couraging him, but also seeing more clearly 
ourselves because of the noble effort. Abil- 
ity, therefore, on the part of the critic to 
identify himself with his author, — to assume 
the author's point of view while preserving 
his own identity, — ^this shall be the chief dis- 
tinction of the future critic. By this stand- 
ard he shall judge others, and by it he shall 
himself be judged. 



22 INTEODUCTION 

The criticism of the future will therefore 
be in no wise academic. It will be conserva- 
tive, to be sure, but conservative in the true 
sense of the word. Eealising the limitations 
of national affinities, it will, in general, re- 
serve for its greatest men the field of inter- 
national criticism, knowing that they alone 
can interpret other races with adequacy and 
sympathy. It will exclude from this limita- 
tion the criticism of work which is universal, 
but even here it will reserve such criticism in 
its higher manifestations for the leaders of its 
thought. 

Lastly, and most important of all, the high- 
est criticism of the future will be left to the 
poets. It will require high seership and a 
special dower, and men shall listen to it as 
to an intellectual law, finding therein the 
perfect freedom which their heart desires. 
Its eminent sanity will stand as a living and 
permanent proof of the fact that the po- 
etic temperament is not necessarily erratic, 
and that one may be possessed by the im- 
aginative temper without being carried away 
from sense in a swirl of sound. Matthew 
Arnold substantially asserts the same fact in 
his lecture On the Modem Element in Litera- 
ture, to which I must have recourse once 
more. '*I shall not, I hope, be thought,'' 



INTEODUCTION 23 

says he, 'Ho magnify too much my office if 
I add, that it is to the poetical literature of 
an age that we must, in general, look for the 
most perfect, the most adequate interpreta- 
tion of that age, — ^for the performance of a 
work which demands the most energetic and 
harmonious activity of all the powers of the 
human mind. ' ' 

Here is a declaration in no uncertain terms 
of the mission of poetical criticism. I should 
like to go a step further, and predict that the 
new criticism will, on the whole, be Gothic, 
recognising, however, that, as applied to crit- 
icism, the terms '^ classic" and ''' Gothic" do 
not necessarily exclude one another. Here 
I must differ for a moment with a deservedly 
admired critic, Mr. Ferris Greenslet. In his 
delicately woven study of James Eussell 
Lowell, which contains much that is stimulat- 
ing and more that is true, he v/rites as fol- 
lows, with Lowell ever before him as a text. 
*'A man may prefer the Gothic to the classic 
and still be a good and stimulating critic. 
But he will hardly take a place upon the su- 
preme bench of the critical court unless there 
be imperishably, potently, in his memory the 
bright forms of classic art as constant touch- 
stones and exemplars. 

*'The truth is that in Lowell's criticism 



24 INTEODUCTION 

there is sometimes a little of the uote of the 
amateur. He writes habitually more as a 
reader, a bookman, than as a professional 
critic. This is one reason why the best of his 
essays are so freshly delightful. Yet it is 
also the reason why the body of his criticism 
is stimulating and suggestive rather than con- 
vincing, and why some few of his studies do 
not so much edify as initiate. ' ' 

Now this attitude is essentially uncritical. 
There is a lurking implication, nowhere pre- 
cisely expressed, that a ** Gothic" critic must 
by his nature be somewhat amateurish, and 
that the critic, to be adequate and convinc- 
ing, must turn to classical models for the in- 
terpretation of his vision. 

This is precisely what we should expect to 
hear from Boileau were he living to-day, and 
betokens something very like a relapse into 
an era of Augustanism. If this point of view 
had been defended by one critic only, I 
should not have held its utterance to be omi- 
nous. But when, out of the six American crit- 
ics whom we value most highly for their acu- 
men, five declare for this standard, there is 
cause for anxiety. Mr. Brownell, Mr. More, 
Mr. Greenslet, Professor Perry, and Mr. 
Huneker, each representing a quite different 
and distinct outlook upon life and letters, all 



INTEODUCTION 25 

declare for Augustanism, and Professor 
Woodberry is left alone to defend the lists of 
romance against all comers. How valiantly 
he does battle for the right, let his New De- 
fence of Poetry attest. The title of the vol- 
ume in which it appears is itself significant, 
and might serve as a motto for the servants 
of the lamp, the genii of the new criticism. 
After all, the purpose of criticism is to read 
and interpret sympathetically the heart of 
ma7i to himself. 

This is the ideal, and it yet falls far short 
of accomplishment. But it is not as far off 
as it seems. The keenest critics which this 
age has produced, — Matthew Arnold and 
Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson and Wal- 
ter Pater, William Ernest Henley and Ar- 
thur Symons, Theodore Watts-Dunton and 
James Russell Lowell, Edmund Clarence 
Stedman and George Edward Woodberry, to 
name no others, — have been the poets, and 
their criticism has been from the poet's point 
of view. 

To quote from Mr. Brownell: *'What crit- 
icism lacks, and what will always be a limita- 
tion to its interest and its power, is the ele- 
ment of beauty which it of necessity largely 
foregoes in its concentration upon truth. It 
is less potent and persuasive than poetry, than 



26 INTEODUCTION 

romance, not because in dealing with litera- 
ture rather than directly with life it occu- 
pies a lower or less vital field, but because its 
province lies outside the realm of all those 
puissant aids to cogency and impressiveness 
that appeal to the sense of beauty and accord- 
ingly influence so powerfully not only the in- 
tellect but the emotions as well/' 

Mr. Brownell may dislike being quoted on 
this subject, for in a vital sense these 
words are an admission of limitation. That 
this limitation is not personal, but largely 
self-inflicted, not only in his case but in 
that of many other deservedly eminent crit- 
ics, is a point which he might dispute, but 
which I feel to be inevitably true. Why 
should not criticism deal with life, and con- 
sider literature only as a mirror in which 
its permanent and fixed reflection may be 
studied ? Matthew Arnold keeps insisting, as 
the new criticism will insist, that the object 
of criticism is to persuade. If the most po- 
tent instrument of persuasion is the poetic 
and romantic impulse, as Mr. Brownell admits 
it to be, then by all means let us employ it in 
preference to any other. 

After all, the poet's outlook upon life can 
be the only true one, for the poet alone is 
consummately dowered with sympathetic in- 



INTRODUCTION 27 

sight, and his gift, if not misapplied, is the 
very gift which the critic should possess above 
all others. 

When I speak of the poets as the critics 
of the future, I, of course, only refer to those 
who, in Arnold's words, *'see life steadily, 
and see it whole." Such critics will not see 
truth by chance flashes of an uncontrolled in- 
sight, (though this sort of insight is better 
than none at all), but will rather take life 
quietly and simply, seeing beauty rather than 
seeking it. The ''poet" of the pornographic 
mind and tongue will have no share in this 
work, and the future critic will bear in mind 
those noble words of Matthew Arnold, taken 
from the lecture On the Modern Element in 
Literature which is destined to be so much 
quoted and discussed. "The human race," 
says he, "has the strongest, the most invin- 
cible tendency to live, to develop itself. It 
retains, it clings to what fosters its life, what 
favours its development, to the literature 
which exhibits it in its vigour; it rejects, it 
abandons what does not foster its develop- 
ment, the literature which exhibits it arrested 
and decayed." 

Such words as these should serve as a warn- 
ing to certain journalistic poets who almost 
form a pathological school, and whose work. 



28 INTRODUCTION 

heady with wine, is a sure portent of disinte- 
gration. The criticism of the future will not 
identify itself with such as these. It will be 
an academy, not a forum or arena. 

Had we no other poets, we might despair of 
the literary issue. But to-day it is America 
and not England whose genuine poetry shows 
promise and an unclouded vision. Now here 
is a new field for its poetic energy, a field 
which can reach and teach many more than 
the books of song. 

Is not the application worthy of a trial? 
Some, consciously or unconsciously, are ex- 
pressing themselves in this new mode, and 
proving that the barrier between creation and 
criticism is purely an imaginary one, which 
consequently never did nor could stand. 
Others, doubtless, lie hidden in ambush. Con- 
ditions in America are surely ripe for such a 
movement. In that lecture O71 the Modern 
Element in Literature, which I here permit 
myself to quote for the last time, Matthew 
Arnold delivered his mind of these mighty 
words. 

''One of the noblest channels of Athenian 
life, that of political activity, had begun to 
narrow and to dry up. That was the true 
catastrophe of the ancient world : it was then 
that the oracles of the ancient world should 



INTRODUCTION 29 

have become silent, and that its gods should 
have forsaken their temples; for from that 
date the intellectual and spiritual life of 
Greece was left without an adequate material 
basis of political and practical life; and both 
began inevitably to decay. The opportunity 
of the ancient world was then lost, never to 
return; for neither the Macedonian nor the 
Roman world, which possessed an adequate 
material basis, possessed, like the Athens of 
earlier times, an adequate intellect and soul to 
inform and inspire them; and there was left 
of the ancient world, when Christianity ar- 
rived, of Greece only a head without a body, 
and of Rome only a body without a soul. ' ' 

These words, though Arnold knew it not, 
were written for us. In the United States, the 
channel of political activity is more active than 
it has ever been before, and the opportunity 
to interpret life is correspondingly great. 

To-day we are living in an age of faith, and 
we believe in the plenary inspiration of plen- 
ary endeavour. Because we have this faith, 
we are peculiarly qualified to undertake the 
task. Beginning modestly, we shall grow in 
sympathy, and growing in sympathy, shall 
develop the critical temper. Developing thus, 
our effort shall spell progress: not the physical 
progress of science and knowledge, but the 



30 INTEODUCTION 

spiritual progress of insight and wisdom. 
Here there will be no room for the pessimist : 
the battle will be to the strong. 

Since the present creative impulse has all 
but ceased, it would surely seem as if the time 
for testing had begun. May we not turn to 
that with the readier vigour, and let this new 
and higher criticism carry us over the shoals ? 
Its result should be a stimulated energy, which 
would flow into creative work, and save us 
from relapsing into an era of formalism and 
Augustanism. Let us preserve while there is 
yet time what creative energy is left to us, for 
a critical purpose, and employ this purpose as 
a stimulant which shall ultimately make our 
work result in a renewed and greater creative 
effort. Doing so, we shall conform to the 
spirit of our age, but, conforming outwardly 
and following the current till we ultimately 
reach a favourable situation, we shall turn and 
master it. 

This is our ideal. How near or how far 
away the realisation of it is, time alone can 
tell, but that it lies beyond us and straight 
ahead is very clear. 

Matthew Arnold was one of the last and 
greatest of the critics under the old law, and 
as such he was a prophet of the new. The 
spirit of a later age spake in and through him, 



INTEODUCTION 31 

when he penned those noble sentences full of 
prophetic truth which close his essay on The 
Function of Criticism at the Present Time. 

"I conclude with what I said at the begin- 
ning: to have the sense of creative activity is 
the great happiness and the great proof of 
being alive, and it is not denied to criticism 
to have it ; but then criticism must be sincere, 
simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its 
knowledge. Then it may have, in no contempt- 
ible measure, a joyful sense of creative ac- 
tivity ; a sense which a man of insight and con- 
science will prefer to what he might derive 
from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inade- 
quate creation. And at some epochs no other 
creation is possible. 

* * Still in full measure, the sense of creative 
activity belongs only to genuine creation; in 
literature we must never forget that. But 
what true man of letters ever can forget it? 
It is no such common matter for a gifted na- 
ture to come into possession of a current of 
true and living ideas, and to produce amidst 
the inspiration of them, that we are likely to 
understate it. The epochs of ^schylus and 
Shakespeare make us feel their preeminence. 
In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true 
life of literature: there is the promised land, 
towards which criticism can onlv beckon. 



32 INTRODUCTION 

That promised land it will not be ours to enter, 
and we shall die in the wilderness : but to have 
desired to enter it, to have saluted it from 
afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction 
among contemporaries ; it will certainly be the 
best title to esteem with posterity. ' ' 

Edward J. 'Brien. 
March 23, 1910. 



ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 



ON THE MODERN ELEMENT 
IN LITERATURE 



ON THE MODEEN ELEMENT 
IN LITEEATURE 

IT is related in one of those legends 
wliicli illustrate the history of Bud- 
dhism, that a certain disciple once 
presented himself before his master, 
Buddha, with the desire to be permitted 
to undertake a mission of peculiar 
difficulty. The compassionate* teacher 
represented to him the obstacles to be 
surmounted and the risks to be run. 
Pourna — so the disciple was called — 
insisted, and replied, with equal humil- 
ity and adroitness, to the successive 
objections of his adviser. Satisfied at 
last by his answers of the fitness of his 
disciple, Buddha accorded to him the 
desired permission; and dismissed him 
to his task with these remarkable words, 
nearly identical with those in which he 
35 



36 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

himself is said to have been admonished 
by a divinity at the ontset of his own 
career: — ^^Go then, Pourna/' are his 
words; ^^ having been delivered, deliver; 
having been consoled, console; being ar- 
rived thyself at the farther bank, en- 
able others to arrive there also." 

It was a moral deliverance, eminently, 
of which the great Oriental reformer 
spoke; it was a deliverance from the 
pride, the sloth, the anger, the selfish- 
ness, which impair the moral activity of 
man — a deliverance which is demanded 
of all individuals and in all ages. But 
there is another deliverance for the 
human race, hardly less important, in- 
deed, than the first — for in the enjoy- 
ment of both united consists man^s true 
freedom — but demanded far less uni- 
versally, and even more rarely and 
imperfectly obtained; a deliverance 
neglected, apparently hardly conceived, 
in some ages, while it has been pursued 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 37 

with earnestness in others, which de- 
rive from that very pursuit their pecul- 
iar character. This deliverance is an 
intellectual deliverance. 

An intellectual deliverance is the 
peculiar demand of those ages which 
are called modern; and those nations 
are said to be imbued with the modern 
spirit most eminently in which the de- 
mand for such a deliverance has been 
made with most zeal, and satisfied with 
most completeness. Such a deliverance 
is emphatically, whether we will or no, 
the demand of the age in which we our- 
selves live. All intellectual pursuits 
our age judges according to their power 
of helping to satisfy this demand ; of all 
studies it asks, above all, the question, 
how far they can contribute to this de- 
liverance. 

I propose, on this my first occasion of 
speaking here,^ to attempt such a gen- 

1 Published in 1869. 



38 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

eral survey of ancient classical litera- 
ture and history as may afford us 
the conviction — in presence of the 
doubts so often expressed of the profit- 
ableness, in the present day, of our 
study of this literature — that, even ad- 
mitting to their fullest extent the 
legitimate demands of our age, the 
literature of ancient Greece is, even for 
modern times, a mighty agent of intel- 
lectual deliverance; even for modern 
times, therefore, an object of indestruc- 
tible interest. 

But first let us ask ourselves why the 
demand for an intellectual deliverance 
arises in such an age as the present, 
and in what the deliverance itself con- 
sists? The demand arises, because our 
present age has around it a copious and 
complex present, and behind it a copious 
and complex past; it arises, because the 
present age exhibits to the individual 
man who contemplates it the spectacle 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 39 

of a vast multitude of facts awaiting 
and inviting his comprehension. The 
deliverance consists in man's compre- 
hension of this present and past. It 
begins when our mind begins to enter 
into possession of the general ideas 
which are the law of this vast multi- 
tude of facts. It is perfect when we 
have acquired that harmonious acquies- 
cence of mind which we feel in con- 
templating a grand spectacle that is 
intelligible to us ; when we have lost that 
impatient irritation of mind which we 
feel in presence of an immense, moving, 
confused spectacle which, while it per- 
petually excites our curiosity, perpetu- 
ally baffles our comprehension. 

This, then, is what distinguishes cer- 
tain epochs in the history of the human 
race, and our own amongst the number ; 
— on the one hand, the presence of a 
significant spectacle to contemplate; on 
the other hand, the desire to find the 



40 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

true point of view from which to con- 
template this spectacle. He who has 
found that point of view, he who ad- 
equately comprehends this spectacle, has 
risen to the comprehension of his age: 
he who conununicates that point of view 
to his age, he who interprets to it that 
spectacle, is one of his age's intellectual 
deliverers. 

The spectacle, the facts, presented for 
the comprehension of the present age, 
are indeed immense. The facts consist 
of the events, the institutions, the 
sciences, the arts, the literatures, in 
which human life has manifested itself 
up to the present time: the spectacle is 
the collective life of humanity. And 
everywhere there is connexion, every- 
where there is illustration: no single 
event, no single literature, is adequately 
comprehended except in its relation to 
other events, to other literatures. The 
literature of ancient Greece, the litera- 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 41 

ture of the Christian Middle Age, so 
long as they are regarded as two 
isolated literatures, two isolated growths 
of the human spirit, are not adequately 
comprehended; and it is adequate com- 
prehension which is the demand of the 
present age. ^^We must compare, '^ — 
the illustrious Chancellor of Cambridge ^ 
said the other day to his hearers at 
Manchester, — ^^we must compare the 
works of other ages with those of our 
own age and country; that, while we 
feel proud of the immense development 
of knowledge and power of production 
which we possess, we may learn humil- 
ity in contemplating the refinement of 
feeling and intensity of thought mani- 
fested in the works of the older schools/' 
To know how others stand, that we 
may know how we ourselves stand; 
and to know how we ourselves stand, 
that we may correct our mistakes 

2 The late Prince Consort. — M. A. 



42 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

and achieve our deliverance — that is our 
problem. 

But all facts, all the elements of the 
spectacle before us, have not an equal 
value — do not merit a like attention: 
and it is well that they do not, for no 
man would be adequate to the task of 
thoroughly mastering them all. Some 
have more significance for us, others 
have less ; some merit our utmost atten- 
tion in all their details, others it is 
sufficient to comprehend in their general 
character, and then they may be dis- 
missed. 

What facts, then, let us ask ourselves, 
what elements of the spectacle before 
us, will naturally be most interesting to 
a highly developed age like our own, to 
an age making the demand which we 
have described for an intellectual de- 
liverance by means of the complete 
intelligence of its own situation? Evi- 
dently, the other ages similarly de- 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 43 

veloped, and making the same demand. 
And what past literature will naturally 
be most interesting to such an age as 
our own? Evidently, the literatures 
which have most successfully solved for 
their ages the problem which occupies 
ours: the literatures which in their day 
and for their own nation have ade- 
quately comprehended, have adequately 
represented, the spectacle before them. 
A significant, a highly-developed, a cul- 
minating epoch, on the one hand, — a 
comprehensive, a commensurate, an 
adequate literature, on the other, — these 
will naturally be the objects of deepest 
interest to our modern age. Such an 
epoch and such a literature are, in fact, 
modern, in the same sense in which our 
own age and literature are modern; 
they are founded upon a rich past and 
upon an instructive fulness of experi- 
ence. 

It may, however, happen that a great 



44 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

epoch is without a perfectly adequate 
literature; it may happen that a great 
age, a great nation, has attained a re- 
markable fulness of political and social 
development, without intellectually tak- 
ing the complete measure of itself, 
without adequately representing that 
development in its literature. In this 
case, the epoch , the nation itself, will 
still be an object of the greatest interest 
to us ; but the literature will be an object 
of less interest to us: the facts, the 
material spectacle, are there; but the 
contemporary view of the facts, 
the intellectual interpretation, are in- 
ferior and inadequate. 

It may happen, on the other hand, 
that great authors, that a powerful 
literature, are found in an age and 
nation less great and powerful than 
themselves ; it may happen that a litera- 
ture, that a man of genius, may arise 
adequate to the representation of a 



THE MODEEN ELEMENT 45 

greater, a more highly developed age 
than that in which they appear; it may 
happen that a literature completely 
interprets its epoch, and yet has some- 
thing over; that it has a force, a rich- 
ness, a geniality, a power of view which 
the materials at its disposition are in- 
sufficient adequately to employ. In such 
a case, the literature will be more in- 
teresting to us than the epoch. The 
interpreting power, the illuminating and 
revealing intellect, are there; but the 
spectacle on which they throw their 
light is not fully worthy of them. 

And I shall not, I hope, be thought to 
magnify too much my office if I add, 
that it is to the poetical literature of 
an age that we must, in general, look 
for the most perfect, the most adequate 
interpretation of that age, — for the 
performance of a work which demands 
the most energetic and harmonious 
activity of all the powers of the human 



46 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

mind. Because that activity of the 
whole mind, that genius, as Johnson 
nobly describes it, ^^ without which judg- 
ment is cold and knowledge is inert; 
that energy which collects, combines, 
amplifies, and animates," is in poetry at 
its highest stretch and in its most 
energetic exertion. 

What we seek, therefore, what will 
most enlighten us, most contribute to 
our intellectual deliverance, is the union 
of two things; it is the coexistence, the 
simultaneous appearance, of a great 
epoch and a great literature. 

Now the culminating age in the life 
of ancient Greece I call, beyond ques- 
tion, a great epoch ; the life of Athens in 
the fifth century before our era I call 
one of the highly developed, one of the 
marking, one of the modern periods in 
the life of the whole human race. It 
has been said that the ^^ Athens of 
Pericles was a vigorous man, at the 



THE MODEEN ELEMENT 47 

summit of his bodily strength and 
mental energy/' There was the utmost 
energy of life there, public and private ; 
the most entire freedom, the most un- 
prejudiced and intelligent observation 
of human affairs. Let us rapidly ex- 
amine some of the characteristics which 
distinguish modern epochs; let us see 
how far the culminating century of 
ancient Greece exhibits them; let us 
compare it, in respect of them, with a 
much later, a celebrated century; let us 
compare it with the age of Elizabeth in 
our own country. 

To begin with what is exterior. One 
of the most characteristic outward 
features of a modern age, of an age of 
advanced civilization, is the banishment 
of the ensigns of war and bloodshed 
from the intercourse of civil life. 
Crime still exists, and wars are still 
carried on ; but within the limits of civil 
life a circle has been formed within 



48 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

which man can move securely, and de- 
velop the arts of peace uninterruptedly. 
The private man does not go forth to 
his daily occupation prepared to assail 
the life of his neighbour or to have to 
defend his own. With the disappear- 
ance of the constant means of offence 
the occasions of offence diminish; 
society at last acquires repose, confi- 
dence, and free activity. An important 
inward characteristic, again, is the 
growth of a tolerant spirit; that spirit 
which is the offspring of an enlarged 
knowledge; a spirit patient of the di- 
versities of habits and opinions. Other 
characteristics are the multiplication of 
the conveniences of life, the formation 
of taste, the capacity for refined pur- 
suits. And this leads us to the supreme 
characteristic of all: the intellectual 
maturity of man himself; the tendency 
to observe facts with a critical spirit; 
to search for their law, not to wander 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 49 

among them at random; to judge by 
the rule of reason, not by the impulse 
of prejudice or caprice. 

Well, now, with respect to the pres- 
ence of all these characteristics in the 
age of Pericles, we possess the explicit 
testimony of an immortal work, — of the 
history of Thucydides. *^The Athen- 
ians first,'' he says, — speaking of the 
gradual development of Grecian society 
up to the period when the Peloponnesian 
war commenced — *Hhe Athenians first 
left oif the habit of wearing arms:" 
that is, this mark of superior civiliza- 
tion had, in the age of Pericles, become 
general in Greece, had long been visible 
at Athens. In the time of Elizabeth, 
on the other hand, the wearing of arms 
was universal in England and through- 
out Europe. Again, the conveniences, 
the ornaments, the luxuries of life, had 
become common at Athens at the time 
of which we are speaking. But there 



50 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

had been an advance even beyond this; 
there had been an advance to that per- 
fection, that propriety of taste which 
proscribes the excess of ornament, the 
extravagance of luxury. The Athenians 
had given up, Thucydides says, had 
given up, although not very long before, 
an extravagance of dress and an excess 
of personal ornament which, in the first 
flush of newly-discovered luxury, had 
been adopted by some of the richer 
classes. The height of civilization in 
this respect seems to have been at- 
tained; there was general elegance and 
refinement of life, and there was sim- 
plicity. What was the case in this 
respect in the Elizabethan age? The 
scholar Casaubon, who settled in Eng- 
land in the reign of James I., bears 
evidence to the want here, even at that 
time, of conveniences of life which 
were already to be met with on the 
continent of Europe. On the other 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 51 

hand, the taste for fantastic, for ex- 
cessive personal adornment, to which 
the portraits of the time bear testimony, 
is admirably set forth in the work of a 
great novelist, who was also a very 
truthful antiquarian — in the **Kenil- 
worth" of Sir Walter Scott. We all 
remember the description, in the thir- 
teenth and fourteenth chapters of the 
second volume of **Kenilworth," of the 
barbarous magnificence, the ** fierce 
vanities," of the dress of the period. 

Pericles praises the Athenians that 
they had discovered sources of recrea- 
tion for the spirit to counterbalance 
the labours of the body : compare these, 
compare the pleasures which charmed 
the whole body of the Athenian people 
through the yearly round of their fes- 
tivals with the popular shows and 
pastimes in ^^Kenilworth." *^We have 
freedom," says Pericles, *^for individ- 
ual diversities of opinion and character; 



52 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

we do not take offense at the tastes 
and habits of our neighbour if they 
differ from our own.'' Yes, in Greece, 
in the Athens of Pericles, there is tol- 
eration; but in England, in the Eng- 
land of the sixteenth century? — the 
Puritans are then in full growth. So 
that with regard to these characteristics 
of civilization of a modern spirit which 
we have hitherto enumerated, the supe- 
riority, it will be admitted, rests with 
the age of Pericles. 

Let us pass to what we said was the 
supreme characteristic of a highly de- 
veloped, a modern age — the manifesta- 
tion of a critical spirit, the endeavour 
after a rational arrangement and appre- 
ciation of facts. Let us consider one 
or two of the passages in the masterly 
introduction which Thucydides, the con- 
temporary of Pericles, has prefixed to 
his history. What was his motive in 
choosing the Peloponnesian War for his 



THE MODEEN ELEMENT 53 

subject? Because it was, in his opinion, 
the most important, the most instructive 
event which had, up to that time, hap- 
pened in the history of mankind. What 
is his effort in the first twenty-three 
chapters of his history? To place in 
their correct point of view all the facts 
which had brought Grecian society to 
the point at which that dominant event 
found it; to strip these facts of their 
exaggeration, to examine them critic- 
ally. The enterprises undertaken in 
the early times of Greece were on a 
much smaller scale than had been com- 
monly supposed. The Greek chiefs 
were induced to combine in the ex- 
pedition against Troy, not by their 
respect for an oath taken by them all 
when suitors to Helen, but by their 
respect for the preponderating influ- 
ence of Agamemnon; the siege of Troy 
had been protracted not so much by the 
valour of the besieged as by the in- 



54 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

adequate mode of warfare necessitated 
by the want of funds of the besiegers. 
No doubt Thueydides' criticism of the 
Trojan war is not perfect; but observe 
how in these and many other points he 
labours to correct popular errors, to 
assign their true character to facts, 
complaining, as he does so, of men's 
habit of uncritical reception of current 
stories. *^So little a matter of care to 
most men,'' he says, ^4s the search 
after truth, and so inclined are they to 
take up any story which is ready to 
their hand." ^*He himself," he con- 
tinues, **has endeavoured to give a true 
picture, and believes that in the main 
he has done so. For some readers his 
history may want the charm of the un- 
critical, half-fabulous narratives of 
earlier writers; but for such as desire 
to gain a clear knowledge of the past, 
and thereby of the future also, which 
will surely, after the course of human 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 55 

things, represent again hereafter, if not 
the very image, yet the near resem- 
blance of the past — if such shall judge 
my work to be profitable, I shall be well 
content." 

What language shall we properly call 
this? It is modern language; it is the 
language of a thoughtful philosophic 
man of our own days ; it is the language 
of Burke or Niebuhr assigning the true 
aim of history. And yet Thucydides is 
no mere literary man; no isolated 
thinker, speaking far over the heads of 
his hearers to a future age — ^no : he was 
a man of action, a man of the world, 
a man of his time. He represents, at 
its best indeed, but he represents, the 
general intelligence of his age and 
nation; of a nation the meanest citizens 
of which could follow with comprehen- 
sion the profoundly thoughtful speeches 
of Pericles. 

Let us now turn for a contrast to a 



56 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

historian of the Elizabethan age, also 
a man of great mark and ability, also 
a man of action, also a man of the 
world. Sir Walter Ealeigh. Sir Walter 
Ealeigh writes the *^ History of the 
World,'' as Thucydides has written the 
*^ History of the Peloponnesian War"; 
let US hear his language; let us mark 
his point of view; let us see what prob- 
lems occur to him for solution. '* See- 
ing," he says, *Hhat we digress in all 
the ways of our lives — ^yea, seeing the 
life of man is nothing else but digres- 
sion — I may be the better excused in 
writing their lives and actions." What 
are the preliminary facts which he 
discusses, as Thucydides discusses the 
Trojan War and the early naval power 
of Crete, and which are to lead up to 
his main inquiry? Open the table of 
contents of his first volume. You will 
find: — *'0f the firmament, and of the 
waters above the firmament, and 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 57 

whetlier there be any crystalline Heaven, 
or any primum mobile." You will 
then find:— *^ Of Fate, and that the 
stars have great influence, and that 
their operations may diversely be pre- 
vented or furthered." Then you come 
to two entire chapters on the place of 
Paradise, and on the two chief trees in 
the garden of Paradise. And in what 
style, with what power of criticism, does 
Raleigh treat the subjects so selected? 
I turn to the 7th section of the third 
chapter of his first book, which treats 
**0f their opinion which make Para- 
dise as high as the moon, and of others 
which make it higher than the middle 
region of the air." Thus he begins 
the discussion of this opinion: — 
** Whereas Beda saith, and as the 
schoolmen affirm Paradise to be a place 
altogether removed from the knowledge 
of men (^ locus a cognitione hominum 
remotissimus'), and Barcephas con- 



58 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

ceived that Paradise was far in the 
east, but mounted above the ocean and 
all the earth, and near the orb of the 
moon (which opinion, though the school- 
men charge Beda withal, yet Pererius 
lays it off from Beda, and his master 
Eabanus) ; and whereas Eupertus in 
his geography of Paradise doth not 
much differ from the rest, but finds it 
seated next or nearest Heaven — ". So 
he states the error, and now for his own 
criticism of it. ** First, such a place 
cannot be commodious to live in, for 
being so near the moon it had been too 
near the sun and other heavenly bodies. 
Secondly, it must have been too joint 
a neighbour to the element of fire. 
Thirdly, the air in that region is so 
violently moved and carried about with 
such swiftness as nothing in that 
place can consist or have abiding. 
Fourthly, — " but what has been quoted 



THE MODEEN ELEMENT 59 

is surely enough, and there is no use in 
continuing. 

Which is the ancient here, and which 
is the modern? Which uses the lan- 
guage of an intelligent man of our own 
days'? which a language wholly ob- 
solete and unfamiliar to us 1 Which has 
the rational appreciation and control of 
his facts? which wanders among them 
helplessly and without a clue? Is it 
our own countryman, or is it the Greek? 
And the language of Ealeigh affords a 
fair sample of the critical power, of 
the point of view, possessed by the 
majority of intelligent men of his day; 
as the language of Thucydides affords 
us a fair sample of the critical power 
of the majority of intelligent men in 
the age of Pericles. 

Well, then, in the age of Pericles we 
have, in spite of its antiquity, a highly- 
developed, a modern, a deeply interest- 



60 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

ing epoch. Next comes the question: 
Is this epoch adequately interpreted 
by its highest literature? Now, the 
peculiar characteristic of the highest 
literature — the poetry — of the fifth cen- 
tury in Greece before the Christian 
era, is its adequacy; the peculiar charac- 
teristic of the poetry of Sophocles is 
its consummate, its unrivalled adequacy; 
that it represents the highly developed 
human nature of that age — human 
nature developed in a number of direc- 
tions, politically, socially, religiously, 
morally developed — in its completest 
and most harmonious development in 
all these directions; while there is shed 
over this poetry the charm of that noble 
serenity which always accompanies true 
insight. If in the body of Athenians of 
that time there was, as we have said, 
the utmost energy of mature manhood, 
public and private; the most entire 
freedom, the most unprejudiced and in- 



THE MODEEN ELEMENT 61 

telligent observation of human affairs 
— in Sophocles there is the same en- 
ergy, the same maturity, the same free- 
dom, the same intelligent observation; 
but all these idealized and glorified by 
the grace and light shed over them from 
the noblest poetical feeling. And there- 
fore I have ventured to say of Soph- 
ocles, that he ''saw life steadily, and 
saw it whole/' Well may we un- 
derstand how Pericles — ^how the great 
statesman whose aim was, it has been 
said, ''to realize in Athens the idea 
which he had conceived of human great- 
ness," and who partly succeeded in his 
aim — should have been drawn to the 
great poet whose works are the noblest 
reflection of his success. ^' 

I assert, therefore, though the de- 
tailed proof of the assertion must be 
reserved for other opportunities, that, 
if the fifth century in Greece before our 
era is a significant and modern epoch, 



62 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

the poetry of that epoch — the poetry of 
Pindar, ^schylus, and Sophocles — is 
an adequate representation and inter- 
pretation of it. 

The poetry of Aristophanes is an 
adequate representation of it also. 
True, this poetry regards humanity 
from the comic side ; but there is a comic 
side from which to regard humanity 
as well as a tragic one; and the distinc- 
tion of Aristophanes is to have regarded 
it from the true point of view on the 
comic side. He too, like Sophocles, re- 
gards the human nature of his time in 
its fullest development; the boldest 
creations of a riotous imagination are 
in Aristophanes, as has been justly said, 
based always upon the foundation of a 
serious thought: politics, education, 
social life, literature — all the great 
modes in which the human life of his 
day manifested itself — are the subjects 
of his thoughts, and of his penetrating 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 63 

comment. There is shed, therefore, 
over his poetry the charm, the vital 
freshness, which is felt when man and 
his relations are from any side ade- 
quately, and therefore genially, re- 
garded. Here is the true difference 
between Aristophanes and Menander. 
There has been preserved an epitome 
of a comparison by Plutarch between 
Aristophanes and Menander, in which 
the grossness of the former, the ex- 
quisite truth to life and felicity of ob- 
servation of the latter, are strongly 
insisted upon ; and the preference of the 
refined, the learned, the intelligent men 
of a later period for Menander loudly 
proclaimed. ^^What should take a man 
of refinement to the theatre," asks 
Plutarch, ^^ except to see one of Menan- 
der 's plays? When do you see the 
theatre filled with cultivated persons, 
except when Menander is acted? and 
he is the favourite refreshment," he 



64 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

continues, ^^to the overstrained mind 
of the laborious philosopher/' And 
every one knows the famous line of 
tribute to this poet by an enthusiastic 
admirer in antiquity: — *^0 Life and 
Menander, which of you painted the 
other?" We remember, too, how a 
great English stateman is said to have 
declared that there was no lost work 
of antiquity which he so ardently de- 
sired to recover as a play of Menander. 
Yet Menander has perished, and Aris- 
tophanes has survived. And to what 
is this to be attributed? To the in- 
stinct of self-preservation in humanity. 
The human race has the strongest, the 
most invincible tendency to live, to de- 
velop itself. It retains, it clings to 
what fosters its life, what favours its 
development, to the literature which 
exhibits it in its vigour; it rejects, it 
abandons what does not foster its de- 
velopment, the literature which exhibits 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 65 

it arrested and decayed. Now, be- 
tween the times of Sophocles and Me- 
nander a great check had befallen the 
development of Greece;— the failure of 
the Athenian expedition to Syracuse, 
and the consequent termination of the 
Peloponnesian War in a result un- 
favourable to Athens. The free expan- 
sion of her growth was checked; one of 
the noblest channels of Athenian life, 
that of political activity, had begun to 
narrow and to dry up. That was the 
true catastrophe of the ancient world; 
it was then that the oracles of the 
ancient world should have become silent, 
and that its gods should have forsaken 
their temples; for from that date the 
intellectual and spiritual life of Greece 
was left without an adequate material 
basis of political and practical life; and 
both began inevitably to decay. The 
opportunity of the ancient world was 
then lost, never to return; for neither 



66 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

the Macedonian nor the Eoman world, 
which possessed an adequate material 
basis, possessed, like the Athens of 
earlier times, an adequate intellect and 
soul to inform and inspire them; and 
there was left of the ancient world, 
when Christianity arrived, of Greece 
only a head without a body, and of 
Eome only a body without a soul. 

It is Athens after this check, after 
this diminution of vitality, — it is man 
with part of his life shorn away, refined 
and intelligent indeed, but sceptical, friv- 
olous, and dissolute, — which the poetry 
of Menander represented. The culti- 
vated, the accomplished might applaud 
the dexterity, the perfection of the 
representation — might prefer it to the 
free genial delineation of a more liv- 
ing time with which they were no longer 
in sympathy. But the instinct of hu- 
manity taught it, that in the one poetry 
there was the seed of life, in the other 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 67 

poetry the seed of death; and it has 
rescued Aristophanes, while it has left 
Menander to his fate. 

In the flowering period of the life of 
Greece, therefore, we have a culminating 
age, one of the flowering periods of the 
life of the human race : in the poetry of 
that age we have a literature commensu- 
rate with its epoch. It is most perfectly 
commensurate in the poetry of Pindar, 
^schylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes ; 
these, therefore, will be the supremely 
interesting objects in this literature; 
but the stages in literature which led 
up to this point of perfection, the stages 
in literature which led downward from 
it, will be deeply interesting also. A 
distinguished person,^ who has lately 
been occupying himself with Homer, 
has remarked that an undue preference 
is given, in the studies of Oxford, to 
these poets over Homer. The justifica- 

3 Mr. Gladstone.— M. A. 



68 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

tion of such a preference, even if we put 
aside all philological considerations, 
lies, perhaps, in what I have said. 
Homer himself is eternally interesting; 
he is a greater poetical power than even 
Sophocles or ^schylus; but his age is 
less interesting than himself, ^schy- 
lus and Sophocles represent an age as. 
interesting as themselves; the names, 
indeed, in their dramas are the names 
of the old heroic world, from which they 
were far separated ; but these names are 
taken, because the use of them permits 
to the poet that free and ideal treat- 
ment of his characters which the high- 
est tragedy demands; and into these 
figures of the old world is poured all 
the fulness of life and of thought which 
the new world had accumulated. This 
new world in its maturity of reason re- 
sembles our own; and the advantage 
over Homer in their greater significance 
for us, which ^schylus and Sophocles 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 69 

gain by belonging to this new worlds 
more than compensates for their poet- 
ical inferiority to him. 

Let us now pass to the Roman world. 
There is no necessity to accumulate 
proofs that the culminating period of 
Roman history is to be classed among 
the leading, the significant, the modern 
periods of the world. There is univer- 
sally current, I think, a pretty correct 
appreciation of the high development 
of the Rome of Cicero and Augustus; 
no one doubts that material civilization 
and the refinements of life were largely 
diffused in it; no one doubts that cul- 
tivation of mind and intelligence were 
widely diffused in it. Therefore, I 
will not occupy time by showing that 
Cicero corresponded with his friends in 
the style of the most accomplished, the 
most easy letter-writers of modern 
times; that Caesar did not write history 
like Sir Walter Raleigh. The great 



70 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

period of Eome is, perhaps, on the 
whole, the greatest, the fullest, the most 
significant period on record; it is cer- 
tainly a greater, a fuller period than the 
age of Pericles. It is an infinitely 
larger school for the men reared in it; 
the relations of life are immeasurably 
multiplied, the events which happen are 
on an immeasurably grander scale. The 
facts, the spectacle of this Eoman world, 
then, are immense: let us see how far 
the literature, the interpretation of the 
facts, has been adequate. 

Let us begin with a great poet, a great 
philosopher, Lucretius. In the case of 
Thucydides I called attention to the fact 
that his habit of mind, his mode of 
dealing with questions, were modern; 
that they were those of an enlightened, 
reflecting man among ourselves. Let 
me call attention to the exhibition in 
Lucretius of a modern feeling not less 
remarkable than the modern thought 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 71 

in Thucydides. The predominance of 
thought, of reflection, in modern epochs 
is not without its penalties; in the un- 
sound, in the over-tasked, in the over- 
sensitive, it has produced the most 
painful, the most lamentable results; it 
has produced a state of feeling unknown 
to less enlightened but perhaps healthier 
epochs — the feeling of depression, the 
feeling of ennui. Depression and en- 
nui; these are the characteristics 
stamped on how many of the repre- 
sentative works of modern times! they 
are also the characteristics stamped 
on the poem of Lucretius. One of the 
most powerful, the most solemn pas- 
sages of the work of Lucretius, one of 
the most powerful, the most solemn 
passages in the literature of the whole 
world, is the well-known conclusion of 
the third book. With masterly touches 
he exhibits the lassitude, the incurable 
tedium which pursue men in their amuse- 



72 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

ments; with indignant irony he up- 
braids them for the cowardice with 
which they cling to a life which for most 
is miserable; to a life which contains, 
for the most fortunate, nothing but the 
old dull round of the same unsatisfying 
objects for ever presented. ^^A man 
rushes abroad, '^ he says, ''because he is 
sick of being at home; and suddenly 
comes home again because he finds him- 
self no whit easier abroad. He posts as 
fast as his horses can take him to his 
country-seat; when he has got there he 
hesitates what to do ; or he throws him- 
self down moodily to sleep, and seeks 
forgetfulness in that; or he makes the 
best of his way back to town again with 
the same speed as he fled from it. Thus 
every one flies from himself.'^ What a 
picture of ennuil of the disease of the 
most modern societies, the most ad- 
vanced civilizations! "0 man," lie ex- 
claims again, "the lights of the world. 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 73 

Scipio, Homer, Epicurus, are dead; wilt 
thou hesitate and fret at dying, whose 
life is well-nigh dead whilst thou art yet 
alive ; who consumest in sleep the greater 
part of thy span, and when awake dron- 
est and ceasest not to dream; and ear- 
nest about a mind troubled with base- 
less fear, and canst not find what it is 
that aileth thee when thou staggerest 
like a drunken wretch in the press of thy 
cares, and welterest hither and thither 
in the unsteady wandering of thy 
spirit!" And again: ^'I have noth- 
ing more than you have already seen," 
he makes Nature say to man, '^to in- 
vent for your amusement; eadem sunt 
omnia semper — all things continue the 
same for ever." 

Yes, Lucretius is modern; but is he 
adequate? And how can a man ade- 
quately interpret the activity of his age 
when he is not in sympathy with it? 
Think of the varied, the abundant, the 



74 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

wide spectacle of the Eoman life of his 
day; think of its fulness of occupation, 
its energy of effort. From these Lu- 
cretius withdraws himself, and bids his 
disciples to withdraw themselves; he 
bids them to leave the business of the 
world, and to apply themselves ^^na- 
turam cognoscere rerum — to learn the 
nature of things ; ' ' but there is no peace, 
no cheerfulness for him either in the 
world from which he comes, or in the 
solitude to which he goes. With stern 
effort, with gloomy despair, he seems 
to rivet his eyes on the elementary real- 
ity, the naked framework of the world, 
because the world in its fulness and 
movement is too exciting a spectacle for 
his discomposed brain. He seems to 
feel the spectacle of it at once terrifying 
and alluring; and to deliver himself 
from it he has to keep perpetually re- 
peating his formula of disenchantment 
and annihilation. In reading him, you 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 75 

understand the tradition which repre- 
sents him as having been driven mad 
by a poison administered as a love- 
charm by his mistress, and as having 
composed his great work in the in- 
tervals of his madness. Lucretius is, 
therefore, overstrained, gloom-weighted, 
morbid ; and he who is morbid is no ade- 
quate interpreter of his age. 

I pass to Virgil ; to the poetical name 
which of all poetical names has perhaps 
had the most prodigious fortune; the 
name which for Dante, for the Middle 
Age, represented the perfection of clas- 
sical antiquity. The perfection of clas- 
sical antiquity Virgil does not represent; 
but far be it from me to add my voice to 
those which have decried his genius; 
nothing that I shall say is, or can ever 
be, inconsistent with a profound, an al- 
most affectionate veneration for him. 
But with respect to him, as with respect 
to Lucretius, I shall freely ask the ques- 



76 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

tion, 75 he adequate? Does he represent 
the epoch in which he lived, the mighty 
Eoman world of his time, as the great 
poets of the great epoch of Greek life 
represented theirs, in all its fulness, in 
all its significance^ 

From the very form itself of his great 
poem, the ^neid, one wonld be led to 
augur that this was impossible. The 
epic form, as a form for representing 
contemporary or nearly contemporary 
events, has attained, in the poems of 
Homer, an unmatched, an immortal suc- 
cess; the epic form as employed by 
learned poets for the reproduction of the 
events of a past age has attained a very 
considerable success. But for this pur- 
pose, for the poetic treatment of the 
events of a past age, the epic form is a 
less vital form than the dramatic form. 
The great poets of the modern period 
of Greece are accordingly, as we have 
seen, the dramatic poets. The chief of 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 77 

these — ^scliylus, Sophocles, Euripides, 
Aristophanes — have survived: the dis- 
tinguished epic poets of the same period 
— Panyasis, Choerilus, Antimachus — 
though praised by the Alexandrian crit- 
ics, have perished in a common destruc- 
tion with the undistinguished. And 
what is the reason of this? It is, that 
the dramatic form exhibits, above all, 
the actions of man as strictly determined 
hy his thoughts and feelings; it exhibits, 
therefore, what may be always acces- 
sible, always intelligible, always inter- 
esting. But the epic form takes a wider 
range ; it represents not only the thought 
and passion of man, that which is uni- 
versal and eternal, but also the forms of 
outward life, the fashion of manners, 
the aspects of nature, that which is local 
or transient. To exhibit adequately 
what is local and transient, only a wit- 
ness, a contemporary, can suffice. In 
the reconstruction f by learning and an- 



78 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

tiquarian ingenuity, of the local and 
transient features of a past age, in their 
representation by one who is not a wit- 
ness or contemporary, it is impossible 
to feel the liveliest kind of interest. 
What, for instance, is the most interest- 
ing portion of the ^neid, — the portion 
where Virgil seems to be moving most 
freely, and therefore to be most ani- 
mated, most forcible? Precisely that 
portion which has most a dramatic char- 
acter; the episode of Dido; that por- 
tion where locality and manners are 
nothing — where persons and characters 
are everything. We might presume 
beforehand, therefore, that if Virgil, at 
a time when contemporary epic poetry 
was no longer possible, had been in- 
spired to represent human life in its 
fullest significance, he would not have 
selected the epic form. Accordingly, 
what is, in fact, the character of the 
poem, the frame of mind of the poet? 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 79 

Has the poem the depth, the complete- 
ness of the poems of ^schylus or Soph- 
ocles, of those adequate and consum- 
mate representations of human life? 
Has the poet the serious cheerfulness of 
Sophocles, of a man who has mastered 
the problem of human life, who knows 
its gravity, and is therefore serious, but 
who knows that he comprehends it, and 
is therefore cheerful? Over the whole 
of the great poem of Virgil, over the 
whole ^neid, there rests an ineffable 
melancholy : not a rigid, a moody gloom, 
like the melancholy of Lucretius; no, a 
sweet, a touching sadness, but still a 
sadness; a melancholy which is at once 
a source of charm in the poem, and a 
testimony to its incompleteness. Vir- 
gil, as Niebuhr has well said, expressed 
no affected self-disparagement, but the 
haunting, the irresistible self-dissatis- 
faction of his heart, when he desired 
on his death-bed that his poem might 



80 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

be destroyed. A man of the most deli- 
cate genius, the most rich learning, but 
of weak health, of the most sensitive 
nature, in a great and overwhelming 
world; conscious, at heart, of his in- 
adequacy for the thorough spiritual 
mastery of that world and its interpre- 
tation in a work of art ; conscious of this 
inadequacy — the one inadequacy, the 
one weak place in the mighty Eoman 
nature! This suffering, this graceful- 
minded, this finely-gifted man is the 
most beautiful, the most attractive fig- 
ure in literary history ; but he is not the 
adequate interpreter of the great period 
of Rome. 

We come to Horace : and if Lucretius, 
if Virgil want cheerfulness, Horace 
wants seriousness. I go back to what 
I said of Menander: as with Menander 
so is it with Horace: the men of taste, 
the men of cultivation, the men of the 
world are enchanted with him; he has 



THE MODERN ELEMENT 81 

not a prejudice, not an illusion, not a 
blunder. True ! yet the best men in the 
best ages have never been thoroughly 
satisfied with Horace. If human life 
were complete without faith, without 
enthusiasm, without energy, Horace, 
like Menander, would be the perfect in- 
terpreter of human life: but it is not; 
to the best, to the most living sense of 
humanity, it is not; and because it is 
not, Horace is inadequate. Pedants are 
tiresome, men of reflection and enthu- 
siasm are unhappy and morbid; there- 
fore Horace is a sceptical man of the 
world. Men of action are without ideas, 
men of the world are frivolous and scep- 
tical; therefore Lucretius is plunged in 
gloom and in stern sorrow. So hard, 
nay, so impossible for most men is it to 
develop themselves in their entireness; 
to rejoice in the variety, the movement 
of human life with the children of the 
world; to be serious over the depth, the 



82 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

significance of human life with the wise ! 
Horace warms himself before the tran- 
sient fire of human animation and hu- 
man pleasure while he can, and is only 
serious when he reflects that the fire 
must soon go out: — 

''Damna tamen celeres reparant coelestia 
lunae : 
Nos, ubi decidimus — " 

**For nature there is renovation, but for 
man there is none ! ' ' — it is exquisite, but 
it is not interpretative and fortifying. 
In the Koman world, then, we have 
found a highly modern, a deeply signifi- 
cant, an interesting period — a period 
more significant and more interesting, 
because fuller, than the great period of 
Greece; but we have not a commen- 
surate literature. In Grreece we have 
seen a highly modern, a most significant 
and interesting period, although on a 
scale of less magnitude and importance 
than the great period of Eome ; but then. 



THE MODEEN ELEMENT 83 

co-existing with the great epoch of 
Greece there is what is wanting to that 
of Eome, a commensurate, an interest- 
ing literature. 

The intellectual history of our race 
cannot be clearly understood without 
applying to other ages, nations, and lit- 
eratures the same method of inquiry 
which we have been here imperfectly 
applying to what is called classical 
antiquity. But enough has at least been 
said, perhaps, to establish the absolute, 
the enduring interest of Greek litera- 
ture, and, above all, of Greek poetry. 



DANTE AND BEATEICE 



DANTE AND BEATRICE 

THOSE critics who allegorize the 
Divine Comedy, who exaggerate, 
or, rather, who mistake the supersensual 
element in Dante's work, who reduce 
to nothing the sensible and human ele- 
ment, are hardly worth refuting. 
They know nothing of the necessary 
laws under which poetic genius works, 
of the inevitable conditions under which 
the creations of poetry are produced. 
But, in their turn, those other critics 
err hardly less widely, who exaggerate, 
or, rather, who mistake the human and 
real element in Dante's poem; who see, 
in such a passion as that of Dante for 
Beatrice, an affection belonging to the 
sphere of actual domestic life, fitted to 
sustain the wear and tear of our ordi- 
87 



88 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

nary daily existence. Into the error of 
those second critics an accomplished 
recent translator of Dante, Mr. Theo- 
dore Martin, seems to me to have fallen. 
He has ever present to his mind, when 
he speaks of the Beatrice whom Dante 
adored, Wordsworth's picture of — 

The perfect woman, nobly planned 
To warm, to comfort, and command; 
And yet a spirit still, and bright 
With something of an angel light. 

He is ever quoting these lines in con- 
nexion with Dante's Beatrice; ever as- 
similating to this picture Beatrice as 
Dante conceived her; ever attributing 
to Dante's passion a character identical 
with that of the affection which Words- 
worth, in the poem from which these 
lines are taken, meant to portray. 
The affection here portrayed by Words- 
worth is, I grant, a substantial human 
affection, inhabiting the domain of real 
life, at the same time that it is poetical 



DANTE AND BEATEICE 89 

and beautiful. But in order to give this 
flesh-and-blood character to Dante's pas- 
sion for Beatrice, what a task has Mr. 
Martin to perform! how much he is 
obliged to imagine! how much to shut 
his ejes to, or to disbelieve! Not per- 
ceiving that the vital impulse of Dante's 
soul is towards reverie and spiritual 
vision ; that the task Dante sets himself 
is not the task of reconciling poetry and 
reality, of giving to each its due part, 
of supplementing the one by the other; 
but the task of sacrificing the world to 
the spirit, of making the spirit all in all, 
of effacing the world in presence of 
the spirit — Mr. Martin seeks to find a 
Dante admirable and complete in the 
life of the world as well as in the life 
of the spirit; and when he cannot find 
him, he invents him. Dante saw the 
world, and used in his poetry what he 
had seen; for he was a born artist. 
But he was essentially aloof from the 



90 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

world, and not complete in the life of 
the world; for he was a born spiritual- 
ist and solitary. Keeping in our minds 
this, his double character, we may seize 
the exact truth as to his relations with 
Beatrice, and steer a right course be- 
tween the error of those who deliteralize 
them too much, on the one hand, and 
that of those who literalize them too 
much, on the other. 

The Divine Comedy, I have already 
said, is no allegory, and Beatrice no 
mere personification of theology. Mr. 
Martin is quite right in saying that 
Beatrice is the Beatrice whom men 
turned round to gaze at in the streets of 
Florence; that she is no '* allegorical 
phantom," no ^^ fiction purely ideal.'' 
He is quite right in saying that Dante 
** worships no phantoms,'' that his pas- 
sion for Beatrice was a real passion, and 
that his love-poetry does not deal ^'in 
the attributes of celestial charms." He 



DANTE AND BEATEICE 91 

was an artist — one of the greatest of 
artists; and art abhors what is vague, 
hollow, and impalpable. 

Enough to make this fully manifest 
we have in the Vita Nuova. Dante 
there records how, a boy of ten, he first 
saw Beatrice, a girl of nine, dressed in 
crimson; how, a second time, he saw 
her, nine years later, passing along the 
street, dressed in white, between two 
ladies older than herself, and how she 
saluted him. He records how after- 
wards she once denied him her saluta- 
tion; he records the profound impres- 
sion which, at her father's death, the 
grief and beauty of Beatrice made on 
all those who visited her; he records 
his meeting with her at a party after 
her marriage, his emotion, and how 
some ladies present, observing his 
emotion, ^'made a mock of him to that 
most gentle being;'' he records her 
death, and how, a year afterwards, some 



92 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

gentlemen found him, on the anniversary 
of her death, ' ' sketching an angel on his 
tablets." He tells us how, a little later, 
he had a vision of the dead Beatrice 
^^ arrayed in the same crimson robe in 
which she had originally appeared to my 
eyes, and she seemed as youthful as on 
the day I saw her first." He mentions 
how, one day, the sight of some pilgrims 
passing along a particular street in 
Florence brought to his mind the 
thought that perhaps these pilgrims, 
coming from a far country, had never 
even heard the name of her who filled 
his thoughts so entirely. And even in 
the Divine Comedy^ composed many 
years afterwards, and treating of the 
glorified Beatrice only, one distinct 
trait of the earthly Beatrice is still pre- 
served — her smile ; the santo riso of the 
Purgatory, the dolce riso of the Para- 
dise. 
Yes, undoubtedly there was a real 



DANTE AND BEATEICE 93 

Beatrice, whom Dante had seen living 
and moving before him, and for whom 
he had felt a passion. This basis of 
fact and reality he took from the life of 
the outward world : this basis was indis- 
pensable to him, for he was an artist. 

But this basis was enough for him 
as an artist: to have seen Beatrice two 
or three times, to have spoken to her 
two or three times, to have felt her 
beauty, her charm; to have had the 
emotion of her marriage, her death — 
this was enough. Art requires a basis 
of fact, but it also desires to treat this 
basis of fact with the utmost freedom; 
and this desire for the freest handling 
of its object is even thwarted when its 
object is too near, and too real. To 
have had his relations with Beatrice 
more positive, intimate, and prolonged, 
to have had an affection for her into 
which there entered more of the life of 
this world, would have even somewhat 



94 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

impeded, one may say, Dante's free use 
of these relations for the purpose of 
art. And the artist nature in him was 
in little danger of being thus impeded; 
for he was a born solitary. 

Thus the conditions of art do not 
make it necessary that Dante's relations 
with Beatrice should have been more 
close and real than the Vita Nuova 
represents them; and the conditions of 
Dante's own nature do not make it 
probable. Not the less do such admirers 
of the poet as Mr. Martin — misconceiv- 
ing the essential characteristic of chival- 
rous passion in general, and of Dante's 
divinization of Beatrice in particular, 
misled by imagining this ** worship for 
woman, ' ' as they call it, to be something 
which it was not, something involving 
modern relations in social life between 
the two sexes — insist upon making out 
of Dante's adoration of Beatrice a sub- 
stantial modern love-story, and of ar- 



DANTE AND BEATRICE 95 

ranging Dante ^s real life so as to turn 
it into the proper sort of real life for 
a ' ' worshipper of woman ' ' to lead. The 
few real incidents of Dante ^s passion, 
enumerated in the Vita Nuova, sufficient 
to give to his great poem the basis which 
it required, are far too scanty to give 
to such a love-story as this the basis 
which it requires; therefore they must 
be developed and amplified. Beatrice 
was a living woman, and Dante had seen 
her; but she must become 

The creature not too bright and good 
For human nature's daily food, 

of Wordsworth's poem: she must be- 
come '^pure flesh and blood— beautiful, 
yet substantial," and ^^ moulded of that 
noble humanity wherewith Heaven 
blesses, not unfrequently, our common 
earth." Dante had saluted Beatrice, 
had spoken to her; but this is not 
enough: he has surely omitted to '^re- 



96 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

cord particulars:'' it is ** scarcely cred- 
ible that he should not have found an 
opportunity of directly declaring his at- 
tachment;" for ^4n position, education, 
and appearance he was a man worth 
any woman, ' ' and his face ' ' at that time 
of his life must have been eminently en- 
gaging/' Therefore ^4t seems strange 
that his love should not have found its 
issue in marriage;" for *^he loved Bea- 
trice as a man loves, and with the pas- 
sion that naturally perseveres to the 
possession of its mistress." 

However, his love did not find its is- 
sue in marriage. Beatrice married 
Messer Simone dei Bardi, to whom, says 
Mr. Martin, ^^her hand had been, per- 
haps lightly or to please her parents, 
pledged, in ignorance of the deep and 
noble passion which she had inspired in 
the young poet's heart." But she cer- 
tainly could not **have been insensible to 
his profound tenderness and passion"; 



DANTE AND BEATRICE 97 

although whether * ^ she knew of it before 
her marriage, ' ' and whether * * she, either 
then or afterwards, gave it her counte- 
nance and approval, and returned it in 
any way, and in what degree" — ques- 
tions which, Mr. Martin says, ^^ naturally 
suggest themselves'' — are, he confesses, 
questions for solving which **the mate- 
rials are most scanty and unsatisfac- 
tory.'' ^* Unquestionably," he adds, ^^it 
startles and grieves us to find Beatrice 
taking part with her friends ^^in laugh- 
ing at Dante when he was overcome at 
first meeting her after her marriage." 
^^But there may," he thinks, **have been 
causes for this — causes for which, in 
justice to her, allowance must be made, 
even as we see that Dante made it." 
Then, again, as to Messer Simone dei 
Bardi's feelings about this attachment 
of Dante to his wife. ^^It is true," says 
Mr. Martin, ^^that we have no direct in- 
formation on this point;" but ''the love 



98 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

of Dante was of an order too pure and 
noble to occasion distrust, even if the 
purity of Beatrice had not placed her 
above suspicion;'' but Dante *^did what 
only a great and manly nature could 
have done — he triumphed over his pain ; 
he uttered no complaint; his regrets 
were buried within his own heart." 
'^At the same time," Mr. Martin thinks, 
*4t is contrary to human nature that a 
love unfed by any tokens of favour 
should retain all its original force; and 
without wrong either to Beatrice or 
Dante, we may conclude that an under- 
standing was come to between them, 
which in some measure soothed his 
heart, if it did not satisfy it." And 
''sooner or later, before Beatrice died, 
we cannot doubt that there came a day 
when words passed between them which 
helped to reconcile Dante to the doom 
that severed her from his side during 
her all too brief sojourn on earth, when 



DANTE AND BEATKICE 99 

the pent-up heart of the poet swept down 
the barriers within which it had so long 
struggled, and he 

Caught up the whole of love, and utter 'd it, 
Then bade adieu for ever, 

if not to her, yet to all those words 
which it was no longer meet should be 
spoken to another's wife." 

But Dante married, as well as Bea- 
trice; and so Dante's married life has 
to be arranged also. '^It is," says Mr. 
Martin, *^only those who have observed 
little of human nature, or of their own 
hearts, who will think that Dante 's mar- 
riage with Gemma Donati argues against 
the depth of sincerity of his first love. 
Why should he not have sought the so- 
lace and the support of a generous 
woman's nature, who, knowing all the 
truth, was yet content with such affec- 
tion as he was able to bring to a second 
love? Nor was that necessarily small. 
Ardent and affectionate as his nature 



100 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

was, the sympathies of such a woman 
must have elicited from him a satisfac- 
tory response; while, at the same time, 
without prejudice to the wife's claim on 
his regard, he might entertain his heav- 
enward dream of the departed Bea- 
trice.'' The tradition is, however, that 
Dante did not live happily with his wife ; 
and some have thought that he means 
to cast a disparaging reflection on his 
marriage in a passage of the Purgatory. 
I need not say that this sort of thing 
would never do for Mr. Martin's hero — 
that hero who can do nothing ' * inconsis- 
tent with the purest respect to her who 
had been the wedded wife of another, on 
the one hand, or with his regard for the 
mother of his children, on the other." 
Accordingly, *^are we to assume," Mr. 
Martin cries, ^ ' that the woman who gave 
herself to him in the full knowledge that 
she was not the bride of his imagination, 
was not regarded by him with the esteem 



DANTE AND BEATEICE 101 

which her devotion was calculated to in- 
spire. '^ It is quite impossible. '^ Dante 
was a true-hearted gentleman, and could 
never have spoken slightingly of her on 
whose breast he had found comfort amid 
many a sorrow, and who had borne to 
him a numerous progeny — the last a 
Beatrice. '^ Donna Gemma was a ^ ^gen- 
erous and devoted woman, ' ' and she and 
Dante ^^ thoroughly understood each 
other. ' ' 

All this has, as applied to real per- 
sonages, the grave defect of being en- 
tirely of Mr. Martin's own imagining. 
But it has a still graver defect, I think, 
as applied to Dante, in being so singu- 
larly inappropriate to its object. The 
grand, impracticable Solitary, with keen 
senses and ardent passions — for nature 
had made him an artist, and art must be, 
as Milton says, *^ sensuous and impas- 
sioned'' — but with an irresistible bent to 
the inward life, the life of imagination, 



102 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

vision, and ecstasy; with an inherent 
impatience of the outward life, the life 
of distraction, jostling, mutual conces- 
sion ; this man ^ ^ of a humour which made 
him hard to get on with, ' ' says Petrarch ; 
*^ melancholy and pensive, '' says Boc- 
caccio; ^^by nature abstracted and taci- 
turn, seldom speaking unless he was 
questioned, and often so absorbed in his 
own reflections that he did not hear the 
questions which were put to him;" who 
could not live with the Florentines, who 
could not live with Gemma Donati, who 
could not live with Can Grande della 
Scala; this lover of Beatrice, but of 
Beatrice a vision of his youth, hardly at 
all in contact with him in actual life, 
vanished from him soon, with whom his 
imagination could deal freely, whom he 
could divinize into a fit subject for the 
spiritual longing which filled him — this 
Dante is transformed, in Mr. Martin's 
hands, into the hero of a sentimental, but 



DANTE AND BEATRICE 103 

strictly virtuous, novel! To make out 
Dante to have been eminent for a wise, 
complete conduct of his outward life, 
seems to me as unimportant as it is im- 
possible. I can quite believe the tradi- 
tion which represents him as not having 
lived happily with his wife, and at- 
tributes her not having joined him in 
his exile to this cause. I can even be- 
lieve, without difficulty, an assertion of 
Boccaccio which excites Mr. Martin's in- 
dignation, that Dante's conduct, even in 
mature life, was at times exceedingly 
irregular. We know how the followers 
of the spiritual life tend to be antino- 
mian in what belongs to the outward life : 
they do not attach much importance to 
such irregularity themselves ; it is their 
fault, as complete men, that they do not ; 
it is the fault of the spiritual life, as a 
complete life, that it allows this tend- 
ency: by dint of despising the outward 
life, it loses the control of this life, and 



104 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

of itself when in contact with it. My 
present business, however, is not to 
praise or blame Dante's practical con- 
duct of his life, but to make clear his 
peculiar mental and spiritual constitu- 
tion. This, I say, disposed him to ab- 
sorb himself in the inner life, wholly to 
humble and efface before this the out- 
ward life. We may see this in the pas- 
sage of the Purgatory where he makes 
Beatrice reprove him for his backslid- 
ings after she, his visible symbol of 
spiritual perfection, had vanished from 
his eyes. 

**For a while" — she says of him to 
the ^' pious substances,'' the angels, — 
^^for a while with my countenance I up- 
held him; showing to him my youthful 
eyes, with me I led him, turning towards 
the right way. 

**Soon as I came on the threshold of 
my second age, and changed my life, this 



DANTE AND BEATEICE 105 

man took himself from me and gave him- 
self to others. 

^^When that I had mounted from flesh 
to spirit, and beauty and spirit were in- 
creased unto me, I was to him less dear 
and less acceptable. 

**IIe turned his steps to go in a way 
not true, pursuing after false images of 
good, which fulfil nothing of the prom- 
ises which they give. 

^ ^ Neither availed it me that I obtained 
inspirations to be granted me, whereby, 
both in dream and otherwise, I called 
him back ; so little heed paid he to them. 

*^So deep he fell, that, for his salva- 
tion all means came short, except to 
show him the people of perdition. 

*'The high decree of God would be 
broken, could Lethe be passed, and that 
so fair aliment tasted, without some scot 
paid of repentance, which pours forth 
tears.'' 



106 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

Here, indeed, and in a somewhat 
similar passage of the next canto, Mr. 
Martin thinks that the *^ obvious allu- 
sion'' is to certain moral shortcomings, 
occasional slips, of which (though he 
treats Boccaccio's imputation as mon- 
strous and incredible) ^' Dante, with his 
strong and ardent passions, having, 
like meaner men, to fight the perennial 
conflict between flesh and spirit," had 
sometimes, he supposes, been guilty. 
An Italian commentator gives at least 
as true an interpretation of these pas- 
sages when he says that ^4n them Dante 
makes Beatrice, as the representative 
of theology, lament that he should 
have left the study of divinity — in 
which, by the grace of Heaven, he might 
have attained admirable proficiency — 
to immerse himself in civil affairs with 
the parties of Florence." But the real 
truth is, that all the life of the world, its 



DANTE AND BEATEICE 107 

pleasures, its business, its parties, its 
politics, all is alike hollow and miserable 
to Dante in comparison with the inward 
life, the ecstasy of the divine vision; 
every way which does not lead straight 
towards this is for him a via non vera; 
every good thing but this is for him a 
false image of good, fulfilling none of 
the promises which it gives; for the 
excellency of the knowledge of this he 
counts all things but loss. Beatrice 
leads him to this; herself symbolizes 
for him the ineffable beauty and purity 
for which he longs. Even to Dante at 
twenty-one, when he yet sees the living 
Beatrice with his eyes, she already 
symbolizes this for him, she is already 
not the ^^ creature not too bright and 
good'^ of Wordsworth, but a spirit far 
more than a woman ; to Dante at twenty- 
five composing the Vita Nuova she is 
still more a spirit; to Dante at fifty, 



108 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

when his character has taken its bent, 
when his genius is come to its perfec- 
tion, when he is composing his immortal 
poem, she is a spirit altogether. 



OBEEMANN 



OBERMANN 

THE most recent edition of Oher- 
mann ^ lies before me, the date on 
its title-page being 1863. It is, I be- 
lieve, the fourth edition which has been 
published; the book made its first ap- 
pearance in 1804 ; three editions, and not 
large editions, have sufficed for the de- 
mand of sixty years. Yet the book has 
lived, though with but this obscure life, 
and is not likely to die. Madame 
George Sand and Monsieur Sainte- 
Beuve have spoken in prose much and 
excellently of the book and its author. 
It may be in the recollection of some 
who read this that I have spoken of 
Ohermann in verse, if not well, at least 

1 OBERMANN.— Par De Senancour. Nouvelle edi- 
tion, revue et corrigee avec une Pr6faee, par George 
Sand. Charpentier, Paris, 1863. 
Ill 



112 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

abundantly. It is to be wished, how- 
ever, that Obermann should also speak 
to English readers for himself; and my 
present design is to take those two or 
three points where he is most significant 
and interesting, and to present some of 
his deliverances on those points in his 
own words. 

It may be convenient, however, that 
first I should repeat here the short 
sketch which I have already given else- 
where of the uneventful life of the 
personage whom we call Obermann. 
His real name is Senancour. In the 
book which occupies us, — a volume of 
letters of which the writer, calling him- 
self Obermann, and writing chiefly from 
Switzerland, delivers his thoughts about 
God, nature, and the human soul, — it is 
Senancour himself who speaks under 
Obermann 's name. Etienne Pivert de 
Senancour, a Frenchman, although hav- 
ing in his nature much that we are ac- 



OBERMANN 113 

customed to consider as by no means 
French, was born in 1770, was trained 
for the priesthood, and passed some 
time in the seminary of St. Sulpice, 
broke away from his training and coun- 
try to live some years in Switzerland, 
where he married, came back to France 
in middle life, and followed thencefor- 
ward the career of a man of letters, but 
with hardly any fame or success. His 
marriage was not a happy one. He 
died an old man in 1846, desiring that 
on his grave might be placed these 
words only: '^Eternite, deviens mon 

Of the letters of Obermann, the writ- 
er's profound inwardness, his austere 
and sad sincerity, and his delicate feel- 
ing for nature, are, as I have elsewhere 
remarked, the distinguishing charac- 
teristics. His constant inwardness, his 
unremitting occupation with that ques- 
tion which haunted St. Bernard — Bern- 



114 ESSAYS IN CBITICISM 

arde, ad quid venisU?—di\^imgm%\x 
him from Goethe and Wordsworth, 
whose study of this question is relieved 
hy the thousand distractions of a poetic 
interest in nature and in man. His 
severe sincerity distinguishes him from 
Eousseau, Chateaubriand, or Byron, 
who in their dealing with this question 
are so often attitudinising and thinking 
of the effect of what they say on the 
public. His exquisite feeling for nature, 
though always dominated by his inward 
self -converse and by his melancholy, yet 
distinguishes him from the men simply 
absorbed in philosophical or religious 
concerns, and places him in the rank of 
men of poetry and imagination. Let 
me try to show these three main charac- 
teristics of Senancour from his own 
words. 

A Frenchman, coming immediately 
after the eighteenth century and the 
French Eevolution, too clear-headed and 



OBEEMANN 115 

austere for any such sentimental Cath- 
olic reaction as that with which Chateau- 
briand cheated himself, and yet, from 
the very profoundness and meditative- 
ness of his nature, religious, Senancour 
felt to the uttermost the bare and bleak 
spiritual atmosphere into which he was 
born. Neither to a German nor to an 
Englishman, perhaps, would such a 
sense of absolute religious denudation 
have then been possible, or such a plain- 
ness and even crudity, therefore, in 
their way of speaking of it. Only to a 
Frenchman were these possible; but 
amid wars, bustle, and the glory of the 
grande nation few Frenchmen had med- 
itativeness and seriousness enough for 
them. Senancour was of a character to 
feel his spiritual position, to feel it 
without dream or illusion, and to feel, 
also, that in the absence of any real in- 
ward basis life was weariness and 
vanity, and the ordinary considerations 



116 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

so confidently urged to induce a man to 
master himself and to be busy in it, 
quite hollow. 

^* People keep talking," says he, ''of 
doing with energy that which ought to 
be done; but, amidst all this parade of 
firmness, tell me, then, what it is that 
ought to he done. For my part I do not 
know; and I venture to suspect that a 
good many others are in the same state 
of ignorance." 

He was born with a passion for order 
and harmony, and a belief in them; his 
being so utterly divested of all conven- 
tional beliefs, makes this single elemen- 
tary belief of his the more weighty and 
impressive. 

*'May we not say that the tendency 
to order forms an essential part of our 
propensities, our instinct, just like the 
tendency to self-preservation, or to the 
reproduction of the species I Is it noth- 



OBERMANN 117 

ing, to live with the calm and the secu- 
rity of the just! '^ 

And therefore, he concludes, ^* inas- 
much as man had this feeling of order 
planted in him, inasmuch as it was in 
his nature, the right course would have 
been to try and make every individual 
man sensible of it and obedient to it/' 
But what has been done! Since the 
beginning of the world, instead of hav- 
ing recourse to this innate feeling, the 
guides of mankind have uniformly 
sought to control human conduct by 
means of supernatural hopes, super- 
natural terrors, thus misleading man's 
intelligence, and debasing his soul. 
^^Depuis trente siecles, les result at s 
sont dignes de la sag esse des moyens/^ 
What are called the virtues, ^^are laws 
of nature as necessary to man as the 
laws of his bodily senses." Instead of 
teaching men to feel this, instead of de- 



118 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

veloping in them that sentiment of order 
and that consciousness of the divine 
which are the native possession of our 
race, Paganism and Christianity alike 
have tampered with man's mind and 
heart, and wrought confusion in them. 

'* Conquerors, slaves, poets, pagan 
priests, and nurses, succeeded in dis- 
figuring the traditions of primitive wis- 
dom by dint of mixing races, destroying 
memorials, explaining allegories and 
making nonsense of them, abandoning 
the profound and true meaning in order 
to discover in them absurd ideas which 
might inspire wonder and awe, and 
personifying abstract beings in order to 
have plenty of objects of worship. The 
principle of life — that which was in- 
telligence, light, the eternal — became 
nothing more than the husband of Juno ; 
harmony, fruit fulness, the bond of all 
living things, became nothing more than 
the mistress of Adonis; imperishable 



OBERMANN 119 

wisdom came to be distinguished only 
through her owl; the great ideas of 
immortality and retribution consisted in 
the fear of turning a wheel, and the hope 
of strolling in a green wood. The in- 
divisible divinity was parcelled into a 
hierarchical multitude torn by miserable 
passions; the fruit of the genius of 
primitive mankind, the emblems of the 
laws of the universe, had degenerated 
into superstitious usages which the chil- 
dren in great cities turned into ridicule." 

Paul at Athens might have set forth, 
in words not unlike these, the degrada- 
tion of the Unknown God; now for the 
religion of which Paul was a minister : — 

'^A moral belief was wanted, because 
pure morality was gone out of men's 
knowledge; dogmas were wanted, which 
should be profound and perhaps un- 
fathomable, but not by any means dog- 
mas which should be absurd, because 
intelligence was spreading more and 



120 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

more. All religions being sunk into 
degradation, there was needed a religion 
of majesty, and answering to man's 
effort to elevate his sonl by the idea of 
a God of all things. There were needed 
religious rites which should be impos- 
ing, not too common, objects of desire, 
mysterious yet simple; rites which 
seemed to belong to a higher world, and 
which yet a man's reason should accept 
as naturally as his heart. There was 
needed, in short, what only a great 
genius could institute, and what I can 
only catch glimpses of. 

**But you have fabricated, patched, 
experimented, altered; renewed I know 
not what incoherent multitude of trivial 
ceremonies and dogmas, more fitted to 
scandalize the weak than to edify them. 
This dubious mixture you have joined 
to a morality sometimes false, often ex- 
ceedingly noble, and almost always aus- 
tere; the one single point in which you 



OBERMANN 121 

have shown sagacity. You pass some 
hundreds of years in arranging all this 
by inspiration; and your slowly built 
work, industriously repaired, but with a 
radical fault in plan, is so made as to 
last hardly longer than the time during 
which you have been accomplishing it.'' 

There is a passage to be meditated by 
the new (Ecumenical Council ! Not that 
Senancour has a trace of the Voltair- 
ian bitterness against Christianity, or 
against Catholicism which to him repre- 
sented Christianity: 

*^So far am I from having any prej- 
udice against Christianity, that I de- 
plore, I may say, what the majority of 
its zealous adherents never themselves 
think of deploring. I could willingly 
join them in lamenting the loss of Chris- 
tianity; but there is this difference be- 
tween us, that they regret it in the form 
into which it settled, nay, in the form, 
even, which it wore a century ago; 



122 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

whereas, I cannot consider such a Chris- 
tianity as that was to be much worthy 
of regret/' 

He owns that religion has done much ; 
but, '*si la religion a fait des grandes 
choses, c^est avec des moyens im- 
menses/' Disposing of such means, it 
ought to have done much more. Re- 
mark, he says, that for the educated 
class religion is one of the weakest of 
the motive-powers they live by; and 
then ask yourself whether it is not ab- 
surd that there should be only a tenth 
part of our race educated. That re- 
ligion should be of use as some re- 
straint to the ignorant and brutal mass 
of mankind, shows, he thinks, not so 
much the beneficence of religion as the 
state of utter confusion and misery into 
which mankind has, in spite of religion, 
drifted ; — 

**I admit that the laws of civil society 
prove to be not restraint enough for this 



OBEEMANN 123 

multitude to which we give no training, 
about which we never trouble our heads, 
which we bring into the world and then 
leave to the chance of ignorant passions 
and of habits of low debauchery. This 
only proves that there is mere wretched- 
ness and confusion under the apparent 
calm of vast states; that the science 
of politics, in the true sense of the term, 
is a stranger to our world, where di- 
plomacy and financial administration 
produce prosperity to be sung in poems, 
and win victories to figure in gazettes. ' ' 
This concern for the state and pros- 
pects of what are called the masses is 
perpetually recurring with Senancour; 
it came to him from his singular lucidity 
and plain-dealing, for it was no com- 
monplace with his time and contempo- 
raries, as it is with ours. ^^ There are 
men," he says, and he was one of them, 
^'who cannot be happy except among 
men who are contented; who feel in 



124 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

their own persons all the enjoyment 
and suffering they witness, and who can- 
not be satisfied with themselves except 
they contribute to the order of the world 
and to man's welfare." ** Arrange 
one's life how one will," he says in an- 
other place, ^^who can answer for its 
being any happier, so long as it is and 
must be sans accord avec les choses, et 
passee au milieu des peuples souffransf^' 
This feeling returns again and again : — 
^^ Inequality is in the nature of things ; 
but you have increased it out of all meas- 
ure, when you ought, on the contrary, to 
have studied to reduce it. The prodi- 
gies of your industry must surely be a 
baneful work of superfluity, if you have 
neither time nor faculties for doing so 
many things which are indispensable. 
The mass of mankind is brutal, foolish, 
given over to its passions; all your ills 
come from this cause. Either do not 
bring men into existence, or, if you do, 



OBEEMANN 125 

give them an existence which is human." 
But as deep as his sense that the time 
was out of joint, was the feeling of this 
Hamlet that he had no power to set it 
right. Vos douleurs ont fletri mon dme, 
he says : — 

**Your miseries have worn out my 
soul; they are intolerable, because they 
are objectless. Our pleasures are il- 
lusory, fugitive ; a day suffices for know- 
ing them and abandoning them. I en- 
quired of myself for happiness, but with 
my eyes open ; I saw that it was not made 
for the man who was isolated: I pro- 
posed it to those who stood round me; 
they had not leisure to concern them- 
selves with it. I asked the multitude in 
its wear and tear of misery, and the 
great of earth under their load of ennui ; 
they answered me: We are wretched 
to-day, but we shall enjoy ourselves to- 
morrow. For my part, I know that the 
day which is coming will only tread in 



126 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

the footsteps of the day which is gone 
before." 

But a root of failure, powerlessness, 
and ennui, there certainly was in the 
constitution of Senancour's own nature; 
so that, unfavourable as may have been 
his time, we should err in attributing to 
any outward circumstances the whole 
of the discouragement by which he is 
pervaded. He himself knew this well, 
and he never seeks to hide it from us. 
*^I1 y a dans moi un derangement," 
says he; '^c'est le desordre des ennuis,' ' 

^^I was born to be not happy. You 
know those dark days, bordering on the 
frosts of winter, when mists hang heav- 
ily about the very dawn, and day begins 
only by threatening lines of a lurid 
light upon the masses of cloud. That 
glooming veil, those stormy squalls, 
those uncertain gleams, that whistling of 
the wind through trees which bend and 
shiver, those prolonged throes like fun- 



OBERMANN 127 

eral groans — you see in them the morn- 
ing of life; at noon, cooler storms and 
more steadily persistent; at evening, 
thicker darkness still, and the day of 
man is brought to an end/' 

No representation of Senancour can, 
however, be complete without some of 
the gleams which relieved this discour- 
agement. Besides the inwardness, be- 
sides the sincerity, besides the renounce- 
ment, there was the poetic emotion and 
the deep feeling for nature. 

*'And I, too, I have my moments of 
forgetfulness, of strength, of grandeur; 
I have desires and yearnings that know 
no limit. But I behold the monuments 
of effaced generations; I see the flint 
wrought by the hand of man, and which 
will subsist a hundred centuries after 
him. I renounce the care for that which 
passes away, and the thought of a pres- 
ent which is already gone. I stand still, 
and marvel; I listen to what subsists 



128 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

yet, I would fain hear what will go on 
subsisting; in the movement of the 
forest, in the murmnr of the pines, I 
seek to catch some of the accents of the 
eternal tongue." 

Nature, and the emotion caused by 
nature, inspire so many beautiful pas- 
sages in Obermann's letters that one is 
embarrassed to make a choice among 
them. The following, with which we 
will end our extracts, is a morning and 
night-piece from the north end of the 
Lake of Neufchatel, where the Eiver 
Thiele enters the lake from Bienne, be- 
tween Saint Blaise and Morat: — 

^^My window had remained open all 
night, as is my habit. Towards four 
o'clock in the morning I was wakened 
by the dawn, and by the scent of the 
hay which they had been cutting in the 
cool early hours by the light of the 
moon. I expected an ordinary view; 
but I had a moment of perfect astonish- 



OBERMANN 129 

•ment. The midsummer rains had kept 
tip the waters which the melting snow in 
the Jura had previously swollen. The 
space between the lake and the Thiele 
was almost entirely flooded; the highest 
spots formed islands of pasture amidst 
the expanse of waters ruffled with the 
fresh breeze of morning. The waves of 
the lake could be made out in the dis- 
tance, driven by the wind against the 
half-flooded bank. Some goats and 
cows, with their herdsman, who made a 
rustic music with a horn, were passing 
at the moment over a tongue of land left 
dry between the flooded plain and the 
Thiele. Stones set in the parts where 
it was worst going supported this nat- 
ural causeway or filled up gaps in it; 
the pasture to which the docile animals 
were proceeding was not in sight, and 
to see their slow and irresolute advance, 
one would have said they were about to 
get out into the lake and be lost there. 



130 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

The heights of Anet and the thick woods 
of Julemont rose out of the waters like 
a desert island without an inhabitant. 
The hilly chain of Vuilly edged the lake 
on the horizon. To the south, this 
chain stretched away behind the slopes 
of Montmirail; and farther on than all 
these objects, sixty leagues of eternal 
snows stamped the whole country with 
the inimitable majesty of those bold 
lines of nature which give to places sub- 
limity. ' ' 

He dines at the toll-house by the river- 
bank, and after passing the afternoon 
there, goes out again late in the even- 
ing:— 

^^The moon had not yet risen; my 
path lay beside the green waters of the 
Thiele. I had taken the key of my lodg- 
ing that I might come in when I liked 
without being tied to a particular hour. 
But feeling inclined to muse, and finding 
the night so warm that there was no 



OBERMANN 131 

hardship in being all night out of doors, 
I took the road to Saint Blaise. I left 
it at a little village called Marin, which 
has the lake to the south of it. I de- 
scended a steep bank, and got upon the 
shore of the lake where its ripple came 
up and expired. The air was calm; 
not a sail was to be seen on the lake. 
Every one was at rest ; some in the f or- 
getfulness of their toils, others in the 
forgetfulness of their sorrows. The 
moon rose; I remained there hours. 
Towards morning, the moon shed over 
earth and waters the ineffable melan- 
choly of her last gleams. Nature seems 
unspeakably grand, when, plunged in a 
long reverie, one hears the washing of 
the waves upon a solitary strand, in the 
calm of a night still enkindled and 
luminous with the setting moon. 

^^Sensibility which no words can ex- 
press, charm and torment of our vain 
years! vast consciousness of a nature 



132 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

everywhere greater than we are, and 
everywhere impenetrable! all-embracing 
passion, ripened wisdom, delicious self- 
abandonment, — everything that a mortal 
heart can contain of life-weariness and 
yearning, I felt it all, I experienced it 
all, in this memorable night. I have 
made an ominous step towards the age 
of decline; I have swallowed up ten 
years of life at once. Happy the 
simple, whose heart is always young!'' 
There, in one of the hours which were 
at once the inspiration and the enerva- 
tion of Senancour 's life, we leave him. 
It is possible that an age, breaking with 
the past, and inclined to tell it the most 
naked truths, may take more pleasure 
than its predecessors in Obermann's 
bleak frankness, and may even give him 
a kind of celebrity. Nevertheless it 
may be predicted with certainty that his 
very celebrity, if he gets it, will have, 
like his life, something maimed, in- 



OBERMANN 133 

complete, and unsuccessful about it; 
and that his intimate friends will still 
be but a few, as they have hitherto been. 
These few will never fail him. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 



SAINTE-BEUVE 

THIS is neither the time nor the 
place to attempt any complete ac- 
count of the remarkable man whose pen, 
busy to the end, and to the end charming 
and instructing us, has within the last 
few weeks dropped from his hand for 
ever. A few words are all that the 
occasion allows, and it is hard not to 
make them words of mere regret and 
eulogy. Most of what is at this moment 
written about him is in this strain, and 
very naturally; the world has some 
arrears to make up to him, and now, if 
ever, it feels this. Late, and as it were 
by accident, he came to his due estima- 
tion in France ; here in England it is only 
within the last ten years that he can 
be said to have been publicly known at 
137 



138 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

all. We who write these lines knew him 
long and owed him much; something of 
that debt we will endeavour to pay, not, 
as we ourselves might be most inclined, 
by following the impulse of the hour 
and simply praising him, but, as he him- 
self would have preferred, by recalling 
what in sum he chiefly was, and what is 
the essential scope of his effort and 
working. 

Shortly before Sainte-Beuve's death 
appeared a new edition of his Portraits 
Contemporains, one of his earlier works, 
of which the contents date from 1832 
and 1833, before his method and manner 
of criticism were finally formed. But 
the new edition is enriched with notes 
and retouches added as the volumes 
were going through the press, and which 
bring our communications with him 
down to these very latest months of his 
life. Among them is a comment on a 
letter of Madame George Sand, in which 



SAINTE-BEUVE 139 

she had spoken of the admiration ex- 
cited by one of his articles. *'I leave 
this as it stands/' says he, ^^ because 
the sense and the connection of the 
passage require it ; but, personne ne salt 
mieux que moi a quoi s'en tenir sur le 
merite dbsolu de ces articles qui sont tout 
au plus, et meme lorsqu'ils reussissent le 
mieux, des choses sensees dans un genre 
mediocre, Ce quails ont eu d^ alert e et 
d'd-propos a leur moment suffit a peine 
a expliquer ces exagerations de Vamitie, 
Reservons V admiration pour les ceuvres 
de poesie et d'art, pour les compositions 
elevees; la plus grande gloire du critique 
est dans Vapprohation et dans Vestime 
des hons esprits." 

This comment, which extends to his 
whole work as a critic, has all the good 
breeding and delicacy by which Sainte- 
Beuve's writing was distinguished, and 
it expresses, too, what was to a great 
extent, no doubt, his sincere conviction. 



140 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

Like so many wlio have tried their hand 
at oeuvres de poesie et d'art, his prefer- 
ence, his dream, his ideal, was there; 
the rest was comparatively journeyman- 
work, to be done well and estimably 
rather than ill and discreditably, and 
with precious rewards of its own, be- 
sides, in exercising the faculties and in 
keeping off ennui; but still work of an 
inferior order. Yet when one looks at 
the names on the title-page of the Por- 
traits Contempo rains: Chateaubriand, 
Beranger, Lamennais, Lamartine, Vic- 
tor Hugo, George Sand, — names repre- 
senting, in our judgment, very different 
degrees of eminence, but none of which 
we have the least inclination to dis- 
parage, — is it certain that the works of 
poetry and art to which these names 
are attached eclipse the work done 
by Sainte-Beuve! Could Sainte-Beuve 
have had what was no doubt his will, 
and in the line of the Consolations and 



SAINTE-BEUVE 141 

Volupte have produced works with the 
power and vogue of Lamartine's works, 
or Chateaubriand's, or Hugo's, would 
he have been more interesting to us to- 
day,— would he have stood permanently 
higher? We venture to doubt it. 
Works of poetry and art like Moliere's 
and Milton's eclipse no doubt all pro- 
ductions of the order of the Causeries 
du Lundi, and the highest language of 
admiration may very properly be re- 
served for such works alone. Inferior 
works in the same kind have their mo- 
ment of vogue when their admirers 
apply to them this language ; there is a 
moment when a drama of Hugo's finds 
a public to speak of it as if it were 
Moliere's, and a poem of Lamartine's 
finds a public to speak of it as if it were 
Milton's. At no moment will a public 
be found to speak of work like Sainte- 
Beuve's Causeries in such fashion; and 
if this alone were regarded, one might 



142 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

allow oneself to leave to Ms work the 
humbler rank which he assigns to it. 
But the esteem inspired by his work 
remains and grows, while the vogue of 
all works of poetry and art but the best, 
and the high-pitched admiration which 
goes with vogue, diminish and disap- 
pear; and this redresses the balance. 
Five-and-twenty years ago it would 
have seemed absurd, in France, to place 
Sainte-Beuve, as a French author, on 
a level with Lamartine. Lamartine had 
at that time still his vogue, and though 
assuredly no Moliere or Milton, had for 
the time of his vogue the halo which 
surrounds properly none but great poets 
like these. To this Sainte-Beuve can- 
not pretend, but what does Lamartine 
retain of it now? It would still be ab- 
surd to place Sainte-Beuve on a level 
with Moliere or Milton ; is it any longer 
absurd to place him on a level with 
Lamartine, or even above him? In 



SAINTE-BEUVE 143 

other words, excellent work in a lower 
kind counts in the long run above work 
which is short of excellence in a higher ; 
first-rate criticism has a permanent 
value greater than that of any but first- 
rate works of poetry and art. 

And Sainte-Beuve's criticism may be 
called first-rate. His curiosity was un- 
bounded, and he was born a naturalist, 
carrying into letters, so often the mere 
domain of rhetoric and futile amuse- 
ment, the ideas and methods of scien- 
tific natural inquiry. And this he did 
while keeping in perfection the ease of 
movement and charm of touch which 
belongs to letters properly so called, 
and which give them their unique power 
of universal penetration and of propa- 
gandism. Man, as he is, and as his 
history and the productions of his spirit 
show him, was the object of his study 
and interest; he strove to find the real 
data with which, in dealing with man 



144 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

and his affairs, we have to do. Beyond 
this study he did not go, — to find the 
real data. But he was determined they 
should be the real data, and not fictitious 
and conventional data, if he could help 
it. This is what, in our judgment, dis- 
tinguishes him, and makes his work of 
singular use and instructiveness. Most 
of us think that we already possess the 
data required, and have only to proceed 
to deal with human affairs in the light 
of them. This is, as is well known, a 
thoroughly English persuasion. It is 
what makes us such keen politicians; it 
is an honour to an Englishman, we say, 
to take part in political strife. Solomon 
says, on the other hand, ^^It is an 
honour to a man to cease from strife, 
hut every fool will be meddling"; 
and Sainte-Beuve held with Solomon. 
Many of us, again, have principles and 
connections which are all in all to us, 
and we arrange data to suit them; — a 



SAINTE-BEUVE 145 

book, a character, a period of history, 
we see from a point of view given by 
our principles and connections, and to 
the requirements of this point of 
view we make the book, the character, 
the period, adjust themselves. Sainte- 
Beuve never did so, and criticised with 
unfailing acuteness those who did. 
^^Tocqueville arrivait avec son moule 
tout pret; la realite n'y repond pas, et 
les choses ne se pretent pas a y entrer/^ 
M. de Tocqueville commands much 
more sympathy in England than his 
critic, and the very mention of him will 
awaken impressions unfavourable to 
Sainte-Beuve ; for the French Liberals 
honour Tocqueville and at heart dislike 
Sainte-Beuve; and people in England 
always take their cue from the French 
Liberals. For that very reason have we 
boldly selected for quotation this criti- 
cism on him, because the course criti- 
cised in Tocqueville is precisely the 



146 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

course with which an Englishman would 
sympathise, and which he would be apt 
to take himself; while Sainte-Beuve, in 
criticising him, shows just the tendency 
which is his characteristic, and by which 
he is of use to us. Tocqueville, as is 
well known, finds in the ancient regime 
all the germs of the centralisation which 
the French Eevolution developed and 
established. This centralisation is his 
bugbear, as it is the bugbear of English 
Liberalism; and directly he finds it, the 
system where it appears is judged. 
Disliking, therefore, the French Eevolu- 
tion for its centralisation, and then 
finding centralisation in the ancient 
regime also, he at once sees in this dis- 
covery, ^^mille motifs nouveaux de hair 
Vancien regime/' How entirely does 
every Englishman abound here, as the 
French say, in Tocqueville 's sense; how 
faithfully have all Englishmen repeated 
and re-echoed Tocqueville 's book on the 



SAINTE-BEUVE 147 

ancient regime ever since it was pub- 
lished; how incapable are they of sup- 
plying, or of imagining the need of 
supplying, any corrective to it! But 
hear Sainte-Beuve : — 

''Dans son effroi de la centralisation, 
I'auteur en vient a meconnaitre de grands 
bienfaits d'equite dus a Eichelieu et a Louis 
XIV. Homme du peuple ou bourgeois, sous 
Louis XIII. , ne valait-il pas mieux avoir af- 
faire a un intendant, a I'homme du roi, qu'a 
un gouverneur de province, a quelque due 
d'Epernon? Ne maudissons pas ceux a qui 
nous devons les commencements de I'egalite 
devant la loi, la premiere ebauche de I'ordre 
moderne qui nous a affranchis, nous et nos 
peres, et le tiers-etat tout entier, de cette quan- 
tite de petits tyrans qui couvraient le sol, 
grands seigneurs ou hobereaux. ' ' 

The point of view of Sainte-Beuve is 
as little that of a glowing Kevolutionist 
as it is that of a chagrined Liberal; it 
is that of a man who seeks the truth 
about the ancient regime and its institu- 
tions, and who instinctively seeks to 



148 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

correct anything strained and arranged 
in the representation of them. ^^Voy- 
ons les choses de V histoire telles qu' 
elles se sont passees," 

At the risk of offending the prejudices 
of English readers we have thus gone 
for an example of Sainte-Beuve's essen- 
tial method to a sphere where his ap- 
plication of it makes a keen impression, 
and created for him, in his lifetime, 
warm enemies and detractors. In that 
sphere it is not easily permitted to a 
man to be a naturalist, but a naturalist 
Sainte-Beuve could not help being al- 
ways. Accidentally, at the end of his 
life, he gave delight to the Liberal 
opinion of his own country and ours by 
his famous speech in the Senate on be- 
half of free thought. He did but follow 
his instinct, however, of opposing, in 
whatever medium he was, the current of 
that medium when it seemed excessive 
and tyrannous. The extraordinary so- 



SAINTE-BEUVE 149 

cial power of French Catholicism makes 
itself specially felt in an assembly like 
the Senate. An elderly Frenchman of 
the upper class is apt to be, not unfre- 
quently, a man of pleasure, reformed or 
exhausted, and the deference of such a 
personage to repression and Cardinals 
is generally excessive. This was enough 
to rouse Sainte-Beuve's opposition; but 
he would have had the same tendency 
to oppose the heady current of a medium 
where mere Liberalism reigned, where it 
was Professor Fawcett, and not the 
Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the 
bit in his teeth. 

That Sainte-Beuve stopped short at 
curiosity, at the desire to know things 
as they really are, and did not press on 
with faith and ardour to the various 
and immense applications of this knowl- 
edge which suggest themselves, and of 
which the accomplishment is reserved 
for the future, was due in part to his 



150 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

character, but more to his date, his 
period, his circumstances. Let it be 
enough for a man to have served well 
one need of his age; and among politi- 
cians and rhetoricians to have been a 
naturalist, at a time when for any good 
and lasting work in government and 
literature our old conventional draught 
of the nature of things wanted in a thou- 
sand directions re-verifying and correct- 
ing. 



RENAN 



RENAN 1 

BURKE says, speaking of himself: *'He 
has never professed himself a friend 
or an enemy to republics or to monarchies in 
the abstract. He thought that the circum- 
stances and habits of every country, which it 
is always perilous and productive of the great- 
est calamities to force, are to decide upon the 
form of its government. There is nothing in 
his nature, his temper, or his faculties, which 
should make him an enemy to any republic, 
modern or ancient. Far from it. He has 
studied the form and spirit of republics very 
early in life ; he has studied them with great 
attention; and with a mind undisturbed by 
affection or prejudice. But the result in his 
mind from that investigation has been and is, 
that neither England nor France, without 
infinite detriment to them, as well in the event 
as in the experiment, could be brought into a 
republican form, but that everything republi- 

1 La JR6forme intellectuelle et morale de la France. 
Par Ernest Renan. Paris: 1871. 

153 



154 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

can which can be introduced with safety into 
either of them must be built upon a mon- 
archy." 

The name of Burke is not mentioned 
in M. Eenan's book, but it is difficult 
to believe that Burke's publications of 
eighty years ago on the French Eevo- 
lution, from which we have quoted the 
foregoing passage, were not in M. 
Eenan's hands when he wrote his recent 
work. If it was so, it detracts nothing 
from M. Eenan's originality; a man of 
his powers cannot but be original in 
the treatment of his subject, and to have 
read and agreed with Burke will not 
make him less so. But the similarity 
of the point of view strikes the reader 
in almost every page; and certainly it 
will be no bad effect of M. Eenan's book 
if it sends us back to those masterpieces 
of thinking and eloquence, the Reflec- 
tions ofi the Revolution in France, the 
Letter to a Member of the National As- 



EENAN 155 

sembly, and the Appeal from the New 
to the Old Whigs. They are far too lit- 
tle read. They need to be received with 
discrimination and judgment, and to 
common liberalism they can never be ac- 
ceptable ; yet so rich is their instructive- 
ness that a serious politician could 
hardly make a better resolve than to 
read them through once every year. 

**You have industriously destroyed all the 
opinions and prejudices, and as far as in you 
lay, all the instincts which support govern- 
ment." "You might, if you pleased, have 
profited by our example. You had the ele- 
ments of a constitution very nearly as good 
as could be wished. You possessed in some 
parts the walls, and in all the foundations, 
of a noble and venerable castle. You might 
have repaired those walls, you might have 
built on those old foundations. You had all 
these advantages in your ancient States; but 
you chose to act as if you had never been 
moulded into civil society, and had everything 
to begin anew.'' ''Rousseau was your canon 
of holy writ." 



156 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

These sentences are Burke's, and 
never surely could he have desired a 
better testimony to his wisdom than for 
a man like M. Renan to say eighty years 
afterwards, with the France of the pres- 
ent moment before his eyes: 

^*If no more had been done at the Revolu- 
tion than to call together the States-General, 
to regularise them, to make them annual, all 
would have been right. But the false policy 
of Rousseau won the day. It was resolved 
to make a constitution a priori. People failed 
to remark that England, the most constitu- 
tional of countries, has never had a written 
constitution, drawn out in black and white/* 
(P. 7.) 

That the rights of its history do more 
for a society than the rights of man, that 
the mere will of the majority is an in- 
sufficient basis for government, that 
France was made by the Capets, that she 
ought never to have broken with them 
entirely, that she would even now do 
well to restore them, the younger branch 



EENAN 157 

of them, if the elder is impracticable, 
that with the monarchy she ought to 
form again aristocratic institutions, a 
second chamber, and, to some extent, a 
hereditary nobility — this is the main 
thesis of the new part of M. Eenan's 
volume. If this is not done, France, he 
thinks, cannot hope to vie with Prussia, 
which owes its victory to its aristocratic 
organisation and to the virtues of en- 
durance and discipline which this organ- 
isation fosters. France's only hope of 
revenge must then be in the Interna- 
tional. The superficial jacobinism, the 
vulgar republicanism, the materialism 
(for by all these names and more does 
M. Eenan call it), which the French 
Eevolution introduced, and which has 
brought France to her present ruin, has 
fatal attractions for the crowd every- 
where ; it has eaten far into the heart and 
life of England; it has overrun all the 
Continent except Prussia and Eussia. 



158 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

Prussia too is very probably doomed 
to enter into this ^^way of all flesh/' to 
be forced into ^Hhe whirl of the witches' 
sabbath of democracy ; ' ' and then Prus- 
sia 's day, too, is over, and France is 
revenged. At the same time M. Eenan 
suggests certain reforms in French edu- 
cation. These reforms may at any rate, 
he thinks, go forward, whatever else the 
future may have in store for us : whether 
a Capet at Rheims or the International 
at Potsdam. 

All this makes the new part of M. 
Kenan's volume. He has reprinted 
here besides, his two letters to Dr. 
Strauss and several other publications 
occasioned by the late war; while the 
volume ends with an essay on Constitu- 
tional Monarchy in France, and another 
on the respective share of the family and 
the State in the work of education, which 
appeared before the war began. These 
two essays may rank with the best things 



EENAN 159 

M. Renan has written, and to read them 
again heightens our admiration of them. 
The new part of the book abounds with 
ingenious and striking thoughts, elo- 
quently expressed ; yet this part will not 
entirely satisfy the friends of M. Renan, 
nor does it quite answer, to say the 
truth, to the impression left on us by the 
summary of its contents which we read 
in the Times before the book appeared. 
It has not the usual consummate round- 
ness of M. Renan 's composition, the 
appearance of having been long and 
thoroughly prepared in the mind, and of 
now coming forth in perfect ripeness; 
there are, or we seem to see, marks here 
and there of haste, excitement, and cha- 
grin. This was perhaps inevitable. 

Our business is not with politics, for- 
eign or domestic; yet on one or two of 
the political points where M. Renan 
does not quite satisfy us, we must touch. 
We will not ask whether France in gen- 



160 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

eral has not let the idea of dynastic at- 
tachment, as M. Renan calls it, and the 
remembrance of its historic self before 
1789, so completely die out that it is 
vain to seek now to restore them, al- 
though, when Burke wrote, this might 
still have been possible. But we will 
observe that this restoration has, in any 
case, an enemy more serious and more 
respectable than that vulgar jacobinism, 
with no higher aim than to content the 
envy and the materialistic cravings of 
the masses, which M. Renan assails with 
such scorn; it has against it the repub- 
licanism of men, for instance, like M. 
Quinet. This republicanism is a rea- 
soned and serious faith, and it grows 
not out of a stupid insensibility to the 
historic life and institutions of a nation, 
nor out of a failure to perceive that in 
the world's progress, as M. Renan elo- 
quently and profoundly urges, all can- 
not shine, all cannot be prosperous, some 



EENAN 161 

sacrificed lives there must be; but it 
grows out of the conviction that in what 
we call our civilisation this sacrifice is 
excessive. Our civilisation in the old 
and famous countries of Europe has 
truly been, as M. Kenan says, in its or- 
igin an aristocratic work, the work of a 
few: its maintenance is the work of a 
few; *^ country, honour, duty, are things 
created and upheld by a small number 
of men amidst a multitude which, left 
to itself, lets them fall." Yes, because 
this multitude are in vice and misery 
outside them; and surely that they are 
so is in itself some condemnation of the 
^^aristocratic work." We do not say 
that the historic life and continuity of a 
nation are therefore to be violently 
broken, or its traditional institutions 
abandoned; but we say that a case has 
been made out against our mere actual 
civilization, and a new work given it to 
do, which were not so visible when Burke 



162 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

wrote, which would certainly have fixed 
the regards of Burke now, and which M. 
Renan too much leaves out of sight. 

A mere looker-on may smile to read 
at p. 153, written before Alsace and Lor- 
raine were ceded and when there was 
still hope of saving them, that France 
could not survive their loss, that she is 
like a building so compact that to pull 
out one or two large stones makes it 
tumble down, or like a living being with 
an organisation so highly centralised 
that to have an important limb cut off is 
death; and then to read at p. 58 and 
other passages, written since peace was 
made, that the immense resources of 
France are hardly at all altered or im- 
paired, that she is a peine entamee. 
But of this kind of inconsistency a man 
of heart and imagination may well be 
guilty when his country is in question; 
Burke, assuredly, might have been guilty 
of it. 



EENAN 163 

Our one serious point of difference 
with M. Renan, and where we confess 
he somewhat disappoints us, is in his 
discussion of the faults of France. 
The capital fault, the cherished defect 
of France, is — what does the reader 
think? — ^want of faith in science, le man- 
que de foi a la science. In the same 
strain speaks Mdme. Sand in the charm- 
ing Letters she has lately published: 
Nous voulons penser et agir a la fois, 
she says; and therefore we are beaten. 
Nay, our amiability itself puts us at a 
disadvantage, she adds, in this bad 
actual world: Nous ne sommes pas 
capables de nous preparer a la guerre 
pendant vingt ans; nous sommes si in- 
capahles de hair! It is the head, la tete, 
which is so greatly in fault; the heart, 
the sentiments are right; le Frangais, 
says M. Renan, est hon, etourdi; yes, 
etourdi he may be, harum-scarum; but 



164 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

he is bon, Burke, whom we have so 
much quoted, says of Charles II.: 

''The person given to us by Monk was a 
man without any sense of his duty as a prince, 
without any regard to the dignity of his 
crown, without any love to his people; disso- 
lute, false, venal, and destitute of any positive 
good quality whatsoever, except a pleasant 
temper and the manners of a gentleman.'* 

So far he, too, was hon: but his good- 
ness had gaps which, though certainly 
he was also without the scientific temper, 
would make us hesitate to say that his 
chief fault was want of faith in science. 
Of France we may say the same. It 
seems to us much more true of England 
than of France that the national defect 
is want of faith in science. In France 
the great defect lies, surely, in a much 
simpler thing — want of faith in conduct. 
M. Eenan's chief concern at the failure 
of the Reformation in France is for what 
tKe head lost ; for the better schools, the 



EENAN 165 

reading, the instruction, which the Eef- 
ormation would have brought with it. 
But M. Michelet put his finger on the 
real cause for concern, when he said 
that the Eeformation failed in France 
because a moral reformation France 
would not have. That sense of personal 
responsibility which is the foundation of 
all true religion, which possessed Luther, 
which possessed also the great saints of 
Catholicism, but which Luther alone 
managed to convey to the popular mind, 
earning thereby — little as we owe him 
for the theological doctrines he imagined 
to be his great boon to us — a most true 
title to our regard; that was what the 
Huguenots had, what the mass of the 
French nation had not and did not care 
to have, and what they suffer to this 
day for not having. One of the gifts 
and graces which M. Eenan finds in 
France is her enmity to pedantry and 
over-strictness in these matters: and in 



166 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

his letter to Dr. Strauss he says that, 
although he himself has been sufficiently 
near holy orders to think himself bound 
to a regular life, he should be sorry not 
to see around him a brilliant and dis- 
sipated society. No one feels more than 
we do the harm which the exaggeration 
of Hebraism has done in England; but 
this is Hellenism with a vengeance! 
Considering what the natural propen- 
sions of men are, such language appears 
to us out of place anywhere, and in 
France simply fatal. Moral conscience, 
self-control, seriousness, steadfastness, 
are not the whole of human life cer- 
tainly, but they are by far the greatest 
part of it; without them — and this is 
the very burden of the Hebrew prophets 
and a fact of experience as old as the 
world — ^nations cannot stand. France 
does not enough see their importance; 
and the worst of it is that no man can 
make another see their importance un- 



EENAN 167 

less lie sees it naturally. For these 
things, just as for the more brilliant 
things of art and science, there is a bent, 
a turn. ^^He showed his ways unto 
Moses, his works unto the children of 
Israel,*' — to them, and to the heavy 
Germanic nations whom they have 
moulded; not, apparently, to the chil- 
dren of Gomer and to Vercingetorix. 
But this opens a troubled prospect for 
the children of Gomer. 

But perhaps we English, too, shall be 
as the children of Gomer ; for M. Eenan 
has a theory that according to ^^that 
great law by which the primitive race 
of an invaded country always ends by 
getting the upper hand, England is be- 
coming every day more Celtic and less 
Germanic;" in the public opinion and 
policy of England for the last thirty 
years he sees the esprit celtique, plus 
doux, plus sympathetique, plus humain. 
We imagine our Irish neighbours by no 



168 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

means share his opinion. A more truly 
Germanic, or, at least, Anglo-Saxon, per- 
formance than the abolition of the Irish 
Church through the power of the Dis- 
senters' antipathy to church-establish- 
ments, then telling ourselves in our 
newspapers we had done it out of a pure 
love of reason and justice, and then call- 
ing solemnly upon the quick-witted 
Irish, who knew that the Dissenters 
would have let the Irish Church stand 
for ever sooner than give a shilling of its 
funds to the Catholics entitled to them, 
to believe our claptrap and be prop- 
erly grateful to us at last, was never 
witnessed. What we call our Philistin- 
ism, to which M. Eenan might perhaps 
apply his favourite epithets of dur et 
rogue, may well bring us into trouble; 
but hardly, we think, our doux esprit 
celtique. 

It seems, indeed, as if, in all that re- 
lates to character and conduct strictly 



EENAN 169 

so called, M. Eenan, whom at other times 
we follow with so much sympathy, saw 
things with other eyes than ours. In 
a parallel between the English Eevolu- 
tion of 1688 and the French Eevolution 
of 1830, he asks himself why the first 
succeeded and the second failed; and 
he answers that it cannot have been 
owing to the difference between William 
of Orange and Louis-Philippe, because 
the second had no faults as a ruler which 
the first did not show in fully as great 
a degree. When we read this, we are 
fairly lost in amazement. Surely the 
most important point in a ruler is char- 
acter; and William III., whatever were 
his faults, had a character great and 
commanding; while Louis-Philippe had, 
or gave the world the impression of hav- 
ing, a character somewhat (to speak 
quite frankly) ignoble. 

We would fain stop here in our enu- 
meration of matters of difference; for 



170 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

to differ with M. Renan is far less nat- 
ural to us than to agree with him. But 
it is impossible not to notice one or two 
assumptions respecting the French Rev- 
olution and the intellectual value of 
France to the world, because to these 
assumptions M. Renan, like almost all 
Frenchmen, seems to challenge the as- 
sent of mankind, at least of all mankind 
except France's rogue et jaloux enemy, 
Prussia. Greece and Judea, he says, 
have had to pay with the loss of their 
national existence the honor of having 
given lessons to all mankind; in like 
manner — 

** France at this moment expiates her Revo- 
lution; she will perhaps one day reap its 
fruits in the grateful memory of emancipated 
nations. ' ' 

Just in the same strain writes Mdme. 
Sand, in the Letters we have already 
quoted : 

**Even though Germany should appear to 
conquer us, we shall remain the peuple initi- 



EENAN 171 

ateur, which receives a lesson and does not 
take one." 

In prosperity the French are incorri- 
gible, so that a time like the present 
offers the only opportunity for dis- 
abusing them of notions of this kind, so 
obstructive to improvement; and M. 
Eenan, one would have hoped, was the 
very man to do it. Greece has given 
us art and science, Judea has given us 
the Bible; these are positive achieve- 
ments. Whoever gives us a just and 
rational constitution of human society 
will also confer a great boon on us and 
effect a great work; but what has the 
French Eevolution accomplished to- 
wards this? Nothing. It was an in- 
surrection against the old routine, it 
furiously destroyed the medieval form 
of society; this it did, and this was well 
if anything had come of it; but into 
what that is new and fruitful has France 
proceeded to initiate us? A colourless, 



172 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

humdrum, and ill-poised life is a baneful 
thing, and men would fain change it; 
but our benefactor and initiator is the 
poet who brings us a new one, not the 
drunkard who gets rid of it by break- 
ing the windows and bringing the house 
about his ears. 

There seems to us a like exaggeration 
in the French estimate of their country's 
intellectual rank in the world. France 
is the plat de sel, the dish containing the 
salt without which all the other dishes 
of the world would be savourless ; she is 
(we will use M. Eenan's own words, for 
a translation might easily do injustice 
to them) — 

''la grande maitresse de rinvestigation sa- 
vante, ringenieuse, vive et prompte initiatrice 
du monde a toute fine et delicate pensee;" 

she alone has — 

''line societe exquise, charmante et serieuse a 
la fois, fine, tolerante, aimable, sachant tout 
sans avoir rien appris, devinant d^ instinct le 
dernier resultat de toute philosophie." 



RENAN 173 

We wonder if it ever occurs to these 
masters du gout et chi tact that in an 
Englishman, an Italian, a German, this 
language provokes a smile. No one 
feels more than we do, and few English- 
men feel enough, the good of that ami- 
ability, even if it does not go very deep, 
of that sympathetic side in the French 
nature, which makes German and Prot- 
estant Alsace cling to defeated France, 
while, mainly for the want of it, pros- 
perous England cannot attach Ireland. 
No one feels more than we do, few 
Englishmen feel enough, the good of 
that desire for lucidity, even apparent, 
in thought and expression, which has 
made the French language. But, after 
all, a nation's intellectual place depends 
upon its having reached the very highest 
rank in the very highest lines of spirit- 
ual endeavour; this is what in the end 
makes its ideal; this is what fixes its 
scale of intellectual judgment, and what 



174 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

it counts by in the world. More than 
twenty years ago we said, lovers of 
France as we are, and abundant and 
brilliant as is her work of a lower or- 
der than the very highest: 

*' France, famed in all great arts, in none 
supreme" — 

and this still seems to ns to be the true 
criticism on her. M. Eenan opposes 
living names, for or against which we 
will say nothing, to the best living 
names of Germany ; but what is one gen- 
eration? and what, directly we leave our 
own generation, are any names but the 
greatest? And where, throughout all 
her generations, has France a name like 
Goethe ? where, still more, has she names 
like Sophocles and Plato, Dante and 
Raphael, Shakespeare and Newton? 
That is the real question for her, when 
she is esteeming herself the salt of the 
earth. Probably the incapacity for seri- 



RENAN 175 

ousness in the highest sense, for what the 
Greeks called to aTrovBalov^ and Virgil calls 
virtus verusque labor, is here too what 
keeps France back from perfection. 
For the Greeks and Romans, and a 
truly Latin race like the Italians, have 
this seriousness intellectually, as the 
Hebrews and the Germanic races have 
it morally; and it may be remarked 
in passing that this distinction makes 
the conditions of the future for Latin 
Italy quite different from those for 
Celtic France. Only seriousness is con- 
structive ; Latin Gaul was a Roman con- 
struction. Old France was, as M. Renan 
himself says, a Germanic construction; 
France has been since 1789 getting rid 
of all the plan, cramps, and stays of 
her original builders, and their edifice 
is in ruins ; but is the Celt, by himself, 
constructive enough to rebuild! 

We sincerely believe that France 
would do well, instead of proclaiming 



176 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

herself the salt of the earth, to ponder 
these things ; and sometimes it is hard to 
refrain from saying so. M. Kenan has 
tempted us; yet we see with regret our 
space nearly gone. Why could we not 
have kept to our own generation 1 and 
then we might have given ourselves the 
pleasure of saying how high is M. Ee- 
nan's place in it. Certainly, we find 
something of a bathos in his challenge 
to Germany to produce a living poet to 
surpass M. Hugo; but in sober serious- 
ness we might challenge Germany, or 
any other country, to produce a living 
critic to surpass M. Renan. We have 
just been reading an American essayist, 
Mr. Higginson, who says that the United 
States are to evolve a type of literary 
talent superior to anything yet seen in 
the mother country; and this perhaps, 
when it is ready, will be something to 
surprise us. But taking things as they 
now are, where shall we find a living 



EENAN 177 

writer who so habitually as M. Renan, 
moves among questions of the deepest 
interest, presents them so attractively, 
discusses them with so much feeling, in- 
sight, and felicity? Even as to the all- 
importance of conduct J which in his irri- 
tation against the ^^ chaste Vandals" 
who have been overrunning France we 
have seen him a little disposed just now 
to underrate, he is far too wise a man 
not to be perfectly sound at bottom. 
Le monde, we find him saying in 1869, 
ne tient debout que par un peu de vertu. 
The faults and dangers both of vulgar 
democracy and of vulgar liberalism 
there is no one who has seen more 
clearly or described so well. The vulgar 
democrat's ^^ happiness of the greatest 
number" he analyses into what it prac- 
tically is — a principle reduisant tout a 
contenter les volontes materialistes des 
joules, of that ^* popular mass, growing 
every day larger, which is destitute of 



178 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

any sort of religious ideal and can rec- 
ognise no social principle beyond and 
above the desire of satisfying these ma- 
terialistic cravings." The esprit dem- 
ocratique of this sort of democracy, avec 
sa violence, son ton ahsolu, sa simplicite 
decevante d^idees, ses soupgons meticu- 
leux, son ingratitude, is admirably 
touched; but touched not less admirably 
is another very different social type, the 
cherished ideal of vulgar liberalism, the 
American type — 

*^fonde essentiellement sur la liberie et la 
propriete sans privileges de classes, sans in- 
stitutions anciennes, sans histoire, sans so- 
ciete anstocratique, sans cour, sans pouvoir 
brilla/)it, sans universites serieuses ni fortes 
institutions scientifiques, Ces sociStes man- 
quent de distinction, de noblesse; elles ne 
font guere d'oeuvres originales en fait d'art 
et de science" — 

but they can come to be very strong 
and to produce very good things, and 
that is enough for our Philistines. 



EENAN 179 

What can be better, and in the end more 
fruitful, than criticism of this force; 
but what constituency can accept a man 
guilty of making it 1 Let M. Eenan con- 
tinue to make it, and let him not fear 
but that in making it, in bringing 
thought into the world to oust claptrap, 
he fulfils a higher duty than by sketch- 
ing paper constitutions, or by prose- 
cuting electoral campaigns in the Seine- 
et-Marne. '^The fashion of this world 
passetH, away,^' wrote Goethe from 
Eome in 1787, '*and I would fain occupy 
myself only with the eternal." 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 

DA miJii, Domine, scire quod scien- 
dum est — ^^ Grant that the knowl- 
edge I get may be the knowledge which 
is worth having!'' — the spirit of that 
prayer ought to rule our education. 
How little it does rule it, every discern- 
ing man will acknowledge. Life is 
short, and our faculties of attention and 
of recollection are limited; in education 
we proceed as if our life were endless, 
and our powers of attention and recol- 
lection inexhaustible. We have not time 
or strength to deal with half of the mat- 
ters which are thrown upon our minds, 
and they prove a useless load to us. 
When some one talked to Themistocles 
of an art of memory, he answered: 
' * Teach me rather to forget ! ' ' The sar- 
183 



184 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

casm well criticises the fatal want of 
proportion between what we put into 
our minds and their real needs and 
powers. 

From the time when first I was led to 
think about education, this want of pro- 
portion is what has most struck me. 
It is the great obstacle to progress, yet 
it is by no means remarked and con- 
tended against as it should be. It 
hardly begins to present itself until we 
pass beyond the strict elements of edu- 
cation — beyond the acquisition, I mean, 
of reading, of writing, and of calculating 
so far as the operations of common life 
require. But the moment we pass be- 
yond these, it begins to appear. Lan- 
guages, grammar, literature, history, 
geography, mathematics, the knowledge 
of nature — what of these is to be taught, 
how much, and how 1 There is no clear, 
well-grounded consent. The same with 
religion. Eeligion is surely to be taught. 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 185 

but what of it is to be taught, and how 1 
A clear, well-grounded consent is again 
wanting. And taught in such fashion 
as things are now, how often must a 
candid and sensible man, if he could be 
offered an art of memory to secure all 
that he has learned of them, as to a 
very great deal of it be inclined to say 
with Themistocles : '* Teach me rather 
to forget!'' 

In England the common notion seems 
to be that education is advanced in two 
ways principally: by for ever adding 
fresh matters of instruction, and by pre- 
venting uniformity. I should be in- 
clined to prescribe just the opposite 
course; to prescribe a severe limitation 
of the number of matters taught, a 
severe uniformity in the line of study 
followed. Wide ranging, and the mul- 
tiplication of matters to be investigated, 
belong to private study, to the develop- 
ment of special aptitudes in the individ- 



186 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

ual learner, and to the demands which 
they raise in him. But separate from 
all this should be kept the broad plain 
lines of study for almost universal use. 
I say almost universal, because they 
must of necessity vary a little with the 
varying conditions of men. Whatever 
the pupil finds set out for him upon these 
lines, he should learn ; therefore it ought 
not to be too much in quantity. The 
essential thing is that it should be well 
chosen. If once we can get it well 
chosen, the more uniformly it can be kept 
to, the better. The teacher will be more 
at home ; and besides, when we have got 
what is good and suitable, there is small 
hope of gain, and great certainty of risk, 
in departing from it. 

No such lines are laid out, and per- 
haps no one could be trusted to lay them 
out authoritatively. But to amuse one- 
self with laying them out in fancy is a 
good exercise for one's thoughts. One 



JOHNSON ^S LIVES 187 

may lay them out for this or that de- 
scription of pupil, in this or that branch 
of study. The wider the interest of the 
branch of study taken, and the more 
extensive the class of pupils concerned, 
the better for our purpose. Suppose 
we take the department of letters. It 
is interesting to lay out in one's mind 
the ideal line of study to be followed by 
all who have to learn Latin and Greek. 
But it is still more interesting to lay 
out the ideal line of study to be followed 
by all who are concerned with that body 
of literature which exists in English, be- 
cause this class is so much more nu- 
merous amongst us. The thing would 
be, one imagines, to begin with a very 
brief introductory sketch of our subject ; 
then to fix a certain series of works to 
serve as what the French, taking an ex- 
pression from the builder's business, 
call points de repere — points which 
stand as so many natural centres, and 



188 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

by returning to which we can always 
find our way again, if we are embar- 
rassed ; finally, to mark out a number of 
illustrative and representative works, 
connecting themselves with each of these 
points de repere. In the introductory 
sketch we are amongst generalities, in 
the group of illustrative works we are 
amongst details ; generalities and details 
have, both of them, their perils for the 
learner. It is evident that, for purposes 
of education, the most important parts 
by far in our scheme are what we call 
the points de repere. To get these 
rightly chosen and thoroughly known is 
the great matter. For my part, in 
thinking of this or that line of study 
which human minds follow, I feel al- 
ways prompted to seek, first and fore- 
most, the leading points de repere in it. 
In editing for the use of the young 
the group of chapters which are now 
commonly distinguished as those of the 



JOHNSON ^S LIVES 189 

Babylonian Isaiah, I drew attention to 
their remarkable fitness for serving as a 
point of this kind to the student of uni- 
versal history. But a work which by 
many is regarded as simply and solely 
a document of religion, there is difficulty, 
perhaps, in employing for historical and 
literary purposes. With works of a 
secular character one is on safer ground. 
And for years past, whenever I have 
had occasion to use Johnson's Lives of 
the Poets, the thought has struck me how 
admirable a point de repere, or fixed 
centre of the sort described above, these 
lives might be made to furnish for the 
student of English literature. If we 
could but take, I have said to myself, the 
most important of the lives in Johnson's 
volumes, and leave out all the rest, what 
a text-book we should have! The vol- 
umes at present are a work to stand in 
a library, '^a work which no gentleman's 
library should be without." But we 



190 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

want to get from them a text-book, to be 
in the hands of every one who desires 
even so much as a general acquaintance 
with English literature; — and so much 
acquaintance as this who does not de- 
sire? The work as Johnson published 
it is not fitted to serve as such a text- 
book; it is too extensive, and contains 
the lives of many poets quite insignifi- 
cant. Johnson supplied lives of all 
whom the booksellers proposed to in- 
clude in their collection of British 
Poets ; he did not choose the poets him- 
self, although he added two or three to 
those chosen by the booksellers. What- 
ever Johnson did in the department of 
literary biography and criticism pos- 
sesses interest and deserves our atten- 
tion. But in his Lives of the Poets 
there are six of pre-eminent interest; 
the lives of six men who, while the rest 
in the collection are of inferior rank, 
stand out as names of the first class in 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 191 

English literature — Milton, Dryden, 
Swift, Addison, Pope, Gray. These six 
writers differ among themselves, of 
course, in power and importance, and 
every one can see, that, if we were fol- 
lowing certain modes of literary classi- 
fication, Milton would have to be placed 
on a solitary eminence far above any 
of them. But if, without seeking a close 
view of individual differences, we form 
a large and liberal first class among 
English writers, all these six personages 
— Milton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, 
Gray — must, I think, be placed in it. 
Their lives cover a space of more than 
a century and a half, from 1608, the 
year of Milton's birth, down to 1771, 
the date of the death of Gray. Through 
this space of more than a century and 
a half the six lives conduct us. We fol- 
low the course of what Warburton well 
calls ^^the most agreeable subject in 
the world, which is literary history," 



192 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

and follow it in the lives of men of 
letters of the first class. And the 
writer of their lives is himself, too, a 
man of letters of the first class. Ma- 
lone calls Johnson ^^the brightest orna- 
ment of the eighteenth century. '^ He 
is justly to be called, at any rate, a man 
of letters of the first class, and the 
greatest power in English letters dur- 
ing the eighteenth century. And in 
these characteristic lives, not finished 
until 1781, and *^ which I wrote,'' as he 
himself tells us, ^'in my usual way, dil- 
atorily and hastily, unwilling to work 
and working with vigour and haste, ' ' we 
have Johnson mellowed by years, John- 
son in his ripeness and plenitude, treat- 
ing the subject which he loved best and 
knew best. Much of it he could treat 
with the knowledge and sure tact of a 
contemporary; even from Milton and 
Dryden he was scarcely further sepa- 
rated than our generation is from Burns 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 193 

and Scott. Having all these recom- 
mendations, his Lives of the Poets do 
indeed truly stand for what Boswell 
calls them, ^Hhe work which of all Dr. 
Johnson's writings will perhaps be read 
most generally and with most pleasure." 
And in the lives of the six chief per- 
sonages of the work, the lives of Mil- 
ton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, and 
Gray, we have its very kernel and 
quintessence ; we have the work relieved 
of whatever is less significant, retain- 
ing nothing which is not highly signifi- 
cant, brought within easy and conven- 
ient compass, and admirably fitted to 
serve as a point de repere, a fixed and 
thoroughly known centre of departure 
and return, to the student of English 
literature. 

I know of no such first-rate piece of 
literature, for supplying in this way the 
wants of the literary student, existing 
at all in any other language; or exist- 



194 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

ing in our own language, for any period 
except the period wMch Johnson's six 
lives cover. A student cannot read them 
without gaining from them, consciously 
or unconsciously, an insight into the 
history of English literature and life. 
He would find great benefit, let me add, 
from reading in connection with each 
biography something of the author with 
whom it deals ; the first two books, say, 
of Paradise Lost, in connection with the 
life of Milton ; Absalom and AcJiitophel, 
and the Dedication to the ^neis, in con- 
nection with the life of Dryden; in con- 
nection with Swift's life, the Battle of 
the Boohs; with Addison's, the Cover- 
ley Papers; with Pope's, the imitations 
of the Satires and Epistles of Horace. 
The Elegy in a Country Churchyard 
everybody knows, and will have it pres- 
ent to his mind when he reads the life 
of Gray. But of the other works which 
I have mentioned how little can this be 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 195 

said; to how many of us are Pope and 
Addison and Dryden and Swift, and 
even Milton himself, mere names, about 
whose date and history and supposed 
characteristics of style we may have 
learnt by rote something from a hand- 
book, but of the real men and of the 
power of their works we know nothing! 
From Johnson's biographies the stu- 
dent will get a sense of what the real 
men were, and with this sense fresh in 
his mind he will find the occasion propi- 
tious for acquiring also, in the way 
pointed out, a sense of the power of 
their works. 

This will seem to most people a very 
unambitious discipline. But the fault 
of most of the disciplines proposed in 
education is that they are by far too 
ambitious. Our improvers of educa- 
tion are almost always for proceeding 
by way of augmentation and complica- 
tion; reduction and simplification, I 



196 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

say, is what is rather required. We give 
the learner too much to do, and we are 
over-zealous to tell him what he ought 
to think. Johnson himself has admir- 
ably marked the real line of our educa- 
tion through letters. He says in his life 
of Pope: — ^^ Judgment is forced upon 
us by experience. He that reads many 
books must compare one opinion or one 
style with another; and when he com- 
pares, must necessarily distinguish, re- 
ject, and prefer.'' The end and aim of 
education through letters is to get this 
experience. Our being told by another 
what its results will properly be found 
to be, is not, even if we are told aright, 
at all the same thing as getting the ex- 
perience for ourselves. The discipline, 
therefore, which puts us in the way of 
getting it, cannot be called an inconsid- 
erable or inefficacious one. We should 
take care not to imperil its acquisition 
by refusing to trust to it in its simplic- 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 197 

ity, by being eager to add, set right, and 
annotate. It is much to secure the read- 
ing, by young English people, of the lives 
of the six chief poets of our nation be- 
tween the years 1650 and 1750, related by 
our foremost man of letters of the eight- 
eenth century. It is much to secure 
their reading, under the stimulus of 
Johnson's interesting recital and for- 
cible judgments, famous specimens of 
the authors whose lives are before them. 
Do not let us insist on also reviewing 
in detail and supplementing Johnson's 
work for them, on telling them what 
they ought really and definitively to 
think about the six authors and about 
the exact place of each in English litera- 
ture. Perhaps our pupils are not ripe 
for it; perhaps, too, we have not John- 
son's interest and Johnson's force; we 
are not the power in letters for our 
century which he was for his. "We may 
be pedantic, obscure, dull, everything 



198 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

that bores, rather than everything that 
attracts; and so Johnson and his lives 
will repel, and will not be received, 
because we insist on being received 
along with them. Again, as we bar a 
learner's approach to Homer and Virgil 
by our chevaux de frise of elaborate 
grammar, so we are apt to stop his way 
to a piece of English literature by im- 
bedding it in a mass of notes and addi- 
tional matter. Mr. Croker's edition of 
Boswell's Life of Johnson is a good ex- 
ample of the labour and ingenuity which 
may be spent upon a masterpiece, with 
the result, after all, really of rather 
encumbering than illustrating it. All 
knowledge may be in itself good, but 
this kind of editing seems to proceed 
upon the notion that we have only one 
book to read in the course of our life, or 
else that we have eternity to read in. 
What can it matter to our generation 
whether it was Molly Aston or Miss 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 199 

Boothby whose preference for Lord 
Lyttelton made Johnson jealous, and 
produced in his Life of Lyttelton a cer- 
tain tone of disparagement? With the 
young reader, at all events, our great 
endeavour should be to bring him face 
to face with masterpieces, and to hold 
him there, not distracting or rebutting 
him with needless excursions or trifling 
details. 

I should like, therefore, to reprint 
Johnson's six chief lives, simply as they 
are given in the edition of four volumes 
octavo, — the edition which passes for 
being the first to have a correct and 
complete text, — and to leave the lives, 
in that natural form, to have their 
effect upon the reader. I should like to 
think that a number of young people 
might thus be brought to know an im- 
portant period of our literary and intel- 
lectual history, by means of the lives of 
six of its leading and representative 



200 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

authors, told by a great man. I should 
like to think that they would go on, 
under the stimulus of the lives, to ac- 
quaint themselves with some leading 
and representative work of each author. 
In the six lives they would at least have 
secured, I think, a most valuable point 
de repere in the history of our English 
life and literature, a point from which 
afterwards to find their way; whether 
they might desire to ascend upwards 
to our anterior literature, or to come 
downwards to the literature of yester- 
day and of the present. 

The six lives cover a period of liter- 
ary and intellectual movement in which 
we are all profoundly interested. It is 
the passage of our nation to prose and 
reason ; the passage to a type of thought 
and expression, modern, European, and 
which on the whole is ours at the pres- 
ent day, from a type antiquated, pe- 
culiar, and which is ours no longer. 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 201 

The period begins with a prose 
like this of Milton: '' They who to 
states and governors of the common- 
wealth direct their speech, high court 
of parliament! or wanting snch access 
in a private condition, write that which 
they foresee may advance the public 
good; I suppose them, if at the begin- 
ning of no mean endeavour, not a little 
altered and moved inwardly in their 
minds/' It ends with a prose like this 
of Smollett: ^^My spirit began to ac- 
commodate itself to my beggarly fate, 
and I became so mean as to go down 
towards Wapping, with an intention to 
inquire for an old schoolfellow, who, I 
understood, had got the command of 
a small coasting vessel then in the river, 
and implore his assistance. ' ' These are 
extreme instances; but they give us no 
unfaithful notion of the change in our 
prose between the reigns of Charles I. 
and of Greorge III. Johnson has re- 



202 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

corded his own impression of the ex- 
tent of the change and of its salutariness. 
Boswell gave him a book to read, writ- 
ten in 1702 by the Enghsh chaplain of 
a regiment stationed in Scotland. *^It 
is sad stuff, sir," said Johnson, after 
reading it; ^^ miserably written, as books 
in general then were. There is now an 
elegance of style nniversally diffused. 
No man now writes so ill as Martin's 
Account of the Hebrides is written. A 
man could not write so ill if he should 
try. Set a merchant's clerk now to 
write, and he'll do better." 

It seems as if a simple and natural 
prose were a thing which we might ex- 
pect to come easy to communities of 
men, and to come early to them; but we 
know from experience that it is not so. 
Poetry and the poetic form of expres- 
sion naturally precede prose. We see 
this in ancient Greece. We see prose 
forming itself there gradually and with 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 203 

labour; we see it passing througli more 
than one stage before it attains to tbor- 
ougb propriety and lucidity, long after 
forms of consummate adequacy have al- 
ready been reached and used in poetry. 
It is a people's growth in practical life, 
and its native turn for developing this 
life and for making progress in it, which 
awakens the desire for a good prose — 
a prose plain, direct, intelligible, serv- 
iceable. A dead language, the Latin, 
for a long time furnished the nations of 
Europe with an instrument of the kind, 
superior to any which they had yet dis- 
covered in their own. But nations such 
as England and France, called to a 
great historic life, and with powerful 
interests and gifts either social or prac- 
tical, were sure to feel the need of hav- 
ing a sound prose of their own, and to 
bring such a prose forth. They brought 
it forth in the seventeenth century; 
France first, afterwards England. 



204 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

The Eestoration marks tlie real mo- 
ment of birth of our modern English 
prose. Men of lucid and direct mental 
habit there were, such as Chillingworth, 
in whom before the Eestoration the de- 
sire and the commencements of a mod- 
ern prose show themselves. There were 
men like Barrow, weighty and powerful, 
whose mental habit the old prose suited, 
who continued its forms and locutions 
after the Eestoration. But the hour 
was come for the new prose, and it grew 
and prevailed. In Jolmson's time its 
victory had long been assured, and the 
old style seemed barbarous. The prose 
writers of the eighteenth century have 
indeed their mannerisms and phrases 
which are no longer ours. Johnson says 
of Milton 's blame of the universities for 
allowing young men designed for Or- 
ders in the Church to act in plays, ' * This 
is sufficiently peevish in a man, who, 
when he mentions his exile from college, 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 205 

relates, with great luxuriance, the com- 
pensation which the pleasures of the 
theatre afford him. Plays were there- 
fore only criminal when they were acted 
by academics.'' We should now-a-days 
not say peevish here, nor luxuriance, nor 
academics. Yet the style is ours by its 
organism, if not by its phrasing. It is 
by its organism — an organism opposed 
to length and involvement, and enabling 
us to be clear, plain, and short — that , 
English style after the Eestoration j 
breaks with the style of the times pre- j 
ceding it, finds the true law of prose, 
and becomes modern; becomes, in spite 
of superficial diif erences, the style of our 
own day. 

Burnet has pointed out how we are 
under obligations in this matter to 
Charles II., whom Johnson described as 
**the last king of England who was a 
man of parts." A king of England by 
no means fulfils his whole duty by being 



206 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

a man of parts, or by loving and en- 
couraging art, science, and literature. 
Yet the artist and the student of the 
natural sciences will always feel a kind- 
ness towards the two Charleses for their 
interest in art and science; and modern 
letters, too, have their debt to Charles 
II., although it may be quite true that 
that prince, as Burnet says, ^*had little 
or no literature. ' ' ^ ^ The King had little 
or no literature, but true and good sense, 
and had got a right notion of style ; for 
he was in France at the time when they 
were much set on reforming their lan- 
guage. It soon appeared that he had a 
true taste. So this helped to raise the 
value of these men (Tillotson and 
others), when the king approved of the 
style their discourses generally ran in, 
which was clear, plain, and short." 

It is the victory of this prose style, 
** clear, plain, and short," over what 
Burnet calls ^'the old style, long and 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 207 

heavy," whicli is the distinguislimg 
achievement, in the history of English 
letters, of the century following the Ees- 
toration. From the first it proceeded 
rapidly and was never checked. Burnet 
says of the Chancellor Finch, Earl of 
Nottingham — **He was long much ad- 
mired for his eloquence, but it was la- 
boured and affected, and he saw it much 
despised before he died.'' A like revo- 
lution of taste brought about a general 
condemnation of our old prose style, 
imperfectly disengaged from the style of 
poetry. By Johnson's time the new 
style, the style of prose, was alto- 
gether paramount in its own proper do- 
main, and in its pride of victorious 
strength had invaded also the domain of 
poetry. 

That invasion is now visited by us 
with a condemnation not less strong and 
general than the condemnation which 
the eighteenth century passed upon the 



208 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

unwieldy prose of its predecessors. But 
let us be careful to do justice while we 
condemn. A thing good in its own 
place may be bad out of it. Prose re- 
quires a different style from poetry. 
Poetry, no doubt, is more excellent in 
\ itself than prose. In poetry man finds 
Sthe highest and most beautiful expres- 
sion of that which is in him. We had 
! far better poetry than the poetry of the 
eighteenth century before that century 
arrived, we have had better since it de- 
parted. Like the Greeks, and unlike the 
French, we can point to an age of poetry 
anterior to our age of prose, eclipsing 
our age of prose in glory, and fixing the 
future character and conditions of our 
literature. We do well to place our 
pride in the Elizabethan age and Shakes- 
peare, as the Greeks placed theirs in 
Homer. We did well to return in the 
present century to the poetry of that 
older age for illumination and inspira- 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 209 

tion, and to put aside, in a great meas- 
ure, the poetry and prose intervening 
between Milton and Wordsworth. Mil- 
ton, in whom our great poetic age ex- 
pired, was the last of the immortals. 
Of the five poets whose lives follow his 
in our proposed volume, three, Dryden, 
Addison, and Swift, are eminent prose- 
writers as well as poets ; two of the three, 
Swift and Addison, far more distin- 
guished as prose-writers than as poets. 
The glory of English literature is in 
poetry, and in poetry the strength of '5) 
the eighteenth century does not lie. 

Nevertheless, the eighteenth century 
accomplished for us an immense liter- 
ary progress, and even its shortcomings 
in poetry were an instrument to that 
progress, and served it. The example 
of Germany may show us what a nation 
loses from having no prose style. The 
practical genius of our people could not 
but urge irresistibly to the production 



210 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

of a real prose style, because for the pur- 
poses of modern life the old English 
prose, the prose of Milton and Taylor, 
is cumbersome, unavailable, impossible. 
A style of regularity, uniformity, pre- 
cision, balance, was wanted. These are 
the qualities of a serviceable prose 
style. Poetry has a different logic, as 
Coleridge said, from prose; poetical 
style follows another law of evolution 
than the style of prose. But there is 
no doubt that a style of regularity, uni- 
formity, precision, balance, will acquire 
a yet stronger hold upon the mind of a 
\ nation, if it is adopted in poetry as well 
1 as in prose, and so comes to govern 
1 both. This is what happened in France. 
1 To the practical, modern, and social 
genius of the French, a true prose was 
indispensable. They produced one of 
conspicuous excellence, one marked in 
the highest degree by the qualities of 
regularity, uniformity, precision, bal- 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 211 

ance. With little opposition from any 
deep-seated and imperious poetic in- 
stincts, they made their poetry conform 
to the law which was moulding their 
prose. French poetry became marked 
with the qualities of regularity, uni- 
formity, precision, balance. This may 
have been bad for French poetry, but 
it was good for French prose. It 
heightened the perfection with which 
those qualities, the true qualities of 
prose, were impressed upon it. When 
England, at the Eestoration, desired a 
modern prose, and began to create it, 
our writers turned naturally to French 
literature, which had just accomplished 
the very process which engaged them. 
The King's acuteness and taste, as we 
have seen, helped. Indeed, to the ad- 
mission of French influence of all kinds, 
Charles the Second's character and that 
of his court were but too favourable. 
But the influence of the French writers 



212 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

was at that moment on the whole fortu- 
nate, and seconded what was a vital and 
necessary effort in our literature. Our 
literature required a prose which con- 
formed to the true law of prose ; and that 
it might acquire this the more surely, it 
compelled poetry, as in France, to con- 
. form itself to the law of prose likewise. 
The classic verse of French poetry was 
the Alexandrine, a measure favourable 
to the qualities of regularity, uniformity, 
precision, balance. Gradually a measure 
favourable to those very same qualities 
— the ten-syllable couplet — established 
itself as the classic verse of England, 
until in the eighteenth century it had 
become the ruling form of our poetry. 
Poetry, or rather the use of verse, 
entered in a remarkable degree, dur- 
ing that century, into the whole of 
the daily life of the civilised classes; 
and the poetry of the century was a 
perpetual school of the qualities requi- 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 213 

site for a good prose, the qualities of/ 
regularity, uniforraity, precision, bal- 
ance. This may have been of no great 
service to English poetry, although tOj 
say that it has been of no service at all,' 
to say that the eighteenth century has in 
no respect changed the conditions of 
English poetical style, or that it has 
changed them for the worse, would be 
untrue. But it was undeniably of sig- 
nal service to that which was the great 
want and work of the hour, English 
prose. 

Do not let us, therefore, hastily de- 
spise Johnson and his century for their 
defective poetry and criticism of poetry. 
True, Johnson is capable of saying: 
^ ^ Surely no man could have fancied that 
he read Lycidas with pleasure had he 
not known the author!" True, he is 
capable of maintaining ^^that the de- 
scription of the temple in Congreve's 
Mourning Bride was the finest poetical 



214 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

passage he had ever read — he recol- 
lected none in Shakespeare equal to it. ' ' 
But we are to conceive of Johnson and 
of this century as having a special task 
committed to them, the establishment 
of English prose ; and as capable of be- 
ing warped and narrowed in their judg- 
ments of poetry by this exclusive task. 
fSuch is the common course and law of 
progress; one thing is done at a time, 
and other things are sacrificed to it. 
We must be thankful for the thing done, 
if it is valuable, and we must put up 
with the temporary sacrifice of other 
things to this one. The other things 
will have their turn sooner or later. 
Above all, a nation with profound poet- 
ical instincts, like the English nation, 
may be trusted to work itself right again 
in poetry after periods of mistaken poet- 
ical practice. Even in the midst of an 
age of such practice, and with his style 
frequently showing the bad influence of 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 215 

it, Gray was saved, we may say, and 
remains a poet whose work has high 
and pure worth, simply by knowing the 
Greeks thoroughly, more thoroughly than 
any English poet had known them since 
Milton. Milton was a survivor from the 
great age of poetry; Dryden, Addison, 
Pope, and Swift were mighty workers 
for the age of prose. Gray, a poet in 
the midst of the age of prose, a poet, 
moreover, of by no means the highest 
force and of scanty productiveness, 
nevertheless claims a place among the 
six chief personages of Johnson's lives, 
because it was impossible for an English 
poet, even in that age, who knew the 
great Greek masters intimately, not to 
respond to their good influence, and to be 
rescued from the false poetical practice 
of his contemporaries. Of such avail to 
a nation are deep poetical instincts even 
in an age of prose. How much more 
may they be trusted to assert themselves 



216 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

after the age of prose has ended, and to 
remedy any poetical mischief done by it ! 
And meanwhile the work of the hour, 
the necessary and appointed work, has 
been done, and we have got our prose. 

Let US always bear in mind, there- 
fore, that the century so well repre- 
sented by Dryden, Addison, Pope, and 
Swift, and of which the literary history 
is so powerfully written by Johnson in 
his lives, is a century of prose — a cen- 
tury of which the great work in liter- 
ature was the formation of English 
prose. Johnson was himself a labourer 
in this great and needful work, and was 
ruled by its influences. His blame of 
genuine poets like Milton and Gray, his 
over-praise of artificial poets like Pope, 
are to be taken as the utterances of a 
man who worked for an age of prose, 
who was ruled by its influences, and 
could not but be ruled by them. Of 
poetry he speaks as a man whose sense 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 217 

for that with which he is dealing is in 
some degree imperfect. 

Yet even on poetry Johnson's utter- 
ances are valuable, because they are the 
utterances of a great and original man. 
That indeed he was ; and to be conducted 
by such a man through an important 
century cannot but do us good, even 
though our guide may in some places 
be less competent than in others. John- 
son was the man of an age of prose. 
Furthermore, he was a strong force of 
conservation and concentration, in an 
epoch which by its natural tendencies 
seemed moving towards expansion and 
freedom. But he was a great man, and 
great men are always instructive. The 
more we study him, the higher will be 
our esteem for the power of his mind, 
the width of his interests, the largeness 
of his knowledge, the freshness, fear- 
lessness, and strength of his judgments. 
The higher, too, will be our esteem for 



218 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

his character. His well-known lines on 
Levett's death, beautiful and touching 
lines, are still more beautiful and touch- 
ing because they recall a whole history 
of Johnson's goodness, tenderness, and 
charity. Human dignity, on the other 
hand, he maintained, we all know how 
well, through the whole long and ar- 
duous struggle of his life, from his 
servitor days at Oxford, down to the 
Jam moriturus of his closing hour. 
His faults and strangenesses are on the 
surface, and catch every eye. But on 
the whole we have in him a good and 
admirable type, worthy to be kept in our 
view for ever, of ^^the ancient and in- 
bred integrity, piety, good-nature and 
good-humour of the English people." 

A volume giving us Johnson's Lives 
of Milton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, 
Pope, Gray, would give us, therefore, the 
compendious story of a whole impor- 
tant age in English Literature, told by 



JOHNSON'S LIVES 219 

a great man, and in a performance wMch 
is itself a piece of English literature of 
the first class. If such a volume could 
but be prefaced by Lord Macaulay's 
Life of Johnson, it would be perfect. 



A ^^ FRIEND OF GOD' 



A ^^ FRIEND OF GOD'' 

THERE has lately been published^ a 
pretty little volume entitled The 
Following of Christ, by John Tauler; 
done into English hy J. R, Morell. It is 
not certain that the work is by Tauler; 
the weight of authority and of probabil- 
ity is, it seems to me, against his being 
its author. The book has many repeti- 
tions, and a manner formal and some- 
times tiresome of conducting its argu- 
ment. Mr. Moreirs translation is writ- 
ten in an English occasionally slovenly 
and even inaccurate. Still, this little 
volume — which is cheap, let me say, as 
well as pretty — should certainly not be 
suffered to pass unnoticed. If it does 
not proceed from Tauler himself, it pro- 

1 By Burns & Gates, London and New York. 

223 



224 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

ceeds from one of that remarkable group 
of Grerman mystics — ^^ Friends of God/' 
as they called themselves — amongst 
whom the great Dominican preacher of 
Strasburg lived and worked. And the 
contents of the little book, notwith- 
standing its forms and repetitions, are 
full of value. Therefore we may well 
say in this case with the Imitation, — 
which itself, also, issued from the deep 
religious movement felt in the Germanic 
lands along the Rhine in the fourteenth 
century: — ^^Ask not who wrote it, but 
attend to what it says.'' Mr. MorelPs 
translation, finally, in spite of its oc- 
casional inaccuracy and slovenliness, is 
on the whole a sound and good one, with 
the signal merit of faithfully reproduc- 
ing the plain and earnest tone character- 
istic of the original. 

Every one is familiar with the Imita- 
tion, attributed to Thomas a Kempis. 
Tauler however, and his immediate 



A '^FEIEND OF GOD" 225 

group, are to most of us names and noth- 
ing more. Tauler's History and Life 
and Twenty-Five of his Sermons, trans- 
lated by Miss Winkworth, were pub- 
lished in 1857, with a preface by Charles 
Kingsley. The book is out of print and 
can hardly be obtained. Some of the 
sermons are interesting, but in general 
the book, even if obtained, will disap- 
point, I think, those who have been at- 
tracted to it by Tauler's reputation, and 
to reprint it as it stands would be unad- 
visable. Much more interesting is the 
Theologia Germanica, also translated by 
Miss Winkworth, a work not by Tauler 
himself, but by one of his group who 
shared his spirit. On this short book 
Luther set the very highest value, and 
justly. But this book likewise is out of 
print, and scarcely obtainable. 

Its merit is of like kind with that of 
the book translated by Mr. Morell to 
which I now wish to call attention. 



226 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

Each of the two is an answer of the sin- 
cere and deeply religious German 
nature to the need felt, by itself and by 
others, in a time such as was the middle 
of the fourteenth century, a time ^^of 
famine '' (to use the words of the proph- 
et Amos) ^*of hearing of the words 
of the Eternal." We read in the Fol- 
lowing of Christ: *'It is often said, He 
who suffereth a man to die of bodily 
hunger when he might have helped the 
sufferer, would be guilty of the death 
of that man. Much more is a man guilty 
towards souls when he letteth them die 
of hunger. For just as the soul is much 
nobler than the body, so much more are 
you guilty if you allow the soul to suf- 
fer hunger.'' To this hunger and suf- 
fering of the soul the Following of 
Christ is a response, but a response with 
a special character of its own. The 
Imitation is also a response to the same 
hunger, but a response of a different 



A ^'FRIEND OF GOD^' 227 

character. ^^No way to life and peace 
but the way of the cross!" that, in sum, 
is the response of the Imitation. Tauler 
and his group would have sincerely pro- 
fessed that they likewise adopted it ; and 
yet the real and characteristic response 
of the ^^ Friends of God" and of such 
works as the Following of Christ and 
the Theologia Germanica is far rather 
this, which I quote from the first-named 
work: ^'Sin killeth nature, but nature 
is abhorrent of death; therefore sin is 
against nature, therefore sinners can 
never have a joy." That is the negative 
side of the response, and its positive 
side is this : ^ ^ They who have left sins 
and come to grace have more delight 
and joy in one day than all sinners have 
ever gained." 

It is the natural truth of religion and 
of Christianity which occupies these 
*^ Friends of God." The truly natural 
thing is virtue. Christian virtue; and 



228 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

that it is so is proved by the peace and 
happiness ensuing from it. ^^It is much 
more according to nature to work virtue 
than vice; for virtue places nature 
firmly and supports it, while vice dis- 
places it. A thoroughly natural man is 
a pure man. That which maketh na- 
ture impure is a faulty accident of na- 
ture and is not the essence of nature. 
But in order to be ^^a thoroughly nat- 
ural man/' one who '^enters into him- 
self, listens to the eternal words, and 
has the life full of ecstasy and joy,'' a 
man must ^^set aside all things and fol- 
low Christ. Christ is the everlasting 
aim of all men." 

I have mentioned Luther as a lover 
of the Theologia Germanica. Luther 
too, some hundred and fifty years after 
our mystics, had to provide for ^ ^ a fam- 
ine of the words of the Eternal.'' 
Vinet has said with perfect truth that 
^Hhe reformers did not separate morals 



A ^^ FRIEND OF GOD'' 229 

from dogma; Calvin, the most dogmatic 
of them all, is the one who most effica- 
ciously and most constantly preached 
morals." Undoubtedly the reformers 
preached morals ; undoubtedly, too, Cal- 
vin and Luther produced an immeasur- 
ably greater effect than Tauler and his 
group. But how was the effect obtained? 
After laying down the Following of 
Christ, I took up Luther's famous 
Commentary on Galatians. The Com- 
mentary deserves its reputation; it has 
clearness, force, unction. But on what 
thought does Luther rest with all his 
weight, as Tauler rests with all his 
weight on the thought : * ' Sin is against 
nature; they who have left sins have 
more delight and joy in one day than all 
sinners have ever gained"? Luther 
rests with his whole weight on the ar- 
ticle of justification, that Gospel doc- 
trine, which, he says, is suavissima et 
consolationis plenissima, '^All heretics 



230 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

have continually failed in this one point, 
that thej do not rightly understand or 
know the article of justification; do not 
see that by none other sacrifice or of- 
fering could God's fierce anger be ap- 
peased, but by the precious blood of the 
son of God." 

The article of justification has been 
made arid and obnoxious by formalists ; 
let us take it from the mouth of this man 
of genius, its earnestly convinced and 
unrivalled expositor. Christ has been 
made a curse for us! — that is the point; 
Christ has assumed, in our stead, the 
guilt and curse of sin from which we 
could not otherwise be delivered, but are 
delivered by believing in his having so 
done. ^^When the merciful Father saw 
us to be so crushed under the curse of 
the law, and so bound by it, that we 
could never through our own strength 
get free from it, he sent his only begot- 
ten Son into the world and laid on him 



A ^'FRIEND OF GOD" 231 

the sins of all men, saying: ^Be thou 
that Peter the denier, that Paul the 
persecutor, that David the adulterer, 
that sinner who ate the apple in Para- 
dise, that thief on the cross ; in a word, 
be thou the person who has done the 
sins of all men ; consider then how thou 
mayest pay and make satisfaction for 
them. ' Then comes in the law and says : 
*I find him a sinner, and a sinner who 
has taken unto himself the sins of all 
men, and I see no sin besides except in 
him, therefore let him die on the cross !' 
and so the law falls upon him and slays 
him. By this transaction the whole 
world has been purged and purified of all 
sins, and at the same time, therefore, 
been set free from death and from all 
evil." By giving our hearty belief to 
this transaction we are admitted to its 
benefits. 

Here we have the Cahala vera, says 
Luther, the true mystery of Christian- 



232 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

ity — here, in the transaction just re- 
corded. I will not now discuss the 
misunderstanding of St. Paul which 
Luther's message of comfort involves. 
I will not discuss its faults as a reli- 
gious conception. I will admit that it 
has been indeed a message of comfort 
to thousands, and has produced much 
good and much happiness. I will simply 
point out that it is mythology, and that 
this is daily becoming more and more 
evident; as sheer mythology, at bottom, 
as Saturn's devouring his children or 
Pallas springing from the head of Zeus. 
The transaction between the magnified 
and non-natural man, whom Luther calls 
**the merciful Father," and his Son, 
never really took place; or what comes 
to the same thing, its having taken place 
can no more be verified, and has no more 
real probability in its favour, than 
Saturn's devouring his children or Pal- 
las springing from the head of Zeus. 



A ^'FRIEND OF GOD'' 233 

This character of mythology is a dis- 
advantage to Luther's message of com- 
fort now. But it was an advantage to 
it when the message was delivered. It 
gave to it an immense superiority in ef- 
fectiveness over such a message of com- 
fort as Tauler's. The one leavened a 
group, and individuals ; the other created 
the Protestant Churches. 

To the mass of those who seek religion, 
an element of mythology in it, far from 
being an objection, has hitherto been a 
recommendation and attraction; and 
they hold to this element as long as ever 
they can. Only, to moral and serious 
people, such as were the Germanic races 
who made the Reformation, it must be 
a moral mythology, and moreover a 
mythology receivable and approvable 
by them in the intellectual stage at which 
they are then arrived. The serious 
Germanic races, visited by that soul-hun- 
ger which Tauler describes, could easily 



234 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

be brought to recognise that rauch of 
the mythology presented to them by 
medieval religion, with its machinery of 
Virgin and saints, Pope and priests, 
was nnscriptural and immoral ; and that 
good works in the current conception 
of them as ^^ fasts, pilgrimages, rosaries, 
vows'' — to adopt Luther's list — were 
unfruitful. A powerful spirit who went 
to the Bible and produced from it a new 
and grave mythology with a new and 
grave conception of righteousness, was 
the man for that moment. Luther's 
doctrine of justification, Calvin's doc- 
trine of election, were far more effective 
to win crowds and found churches than 
Tauler's Following of Christ just be- 
cause the doctrines of Calvin and Lu- 
ther are mythology, while the doctrine 
of Tauler is not. Luther's doctrine 
and Calvin's were a mythology appeal- 
ing directly and solely to the Bible for 
support, and they professed, also, to 



A ^^FEIEND OF GOD'^ 235 

deepen men's conception of righteous- 
ness; they were therefore acceptable to 
thousands of serious people in the intel- 
lectual and moral stage of that time. 
They were, however, a mythology. But 
as such they enlisted in their favour 
those forces of imagination, wonder, 
and awe, which men love to feel aroused 
within them; and they enlisted these in 
an immeasurably greater degree than 
Tauler's doctrine of the Following of 
Christ, which is not a mythology at all. 
Hence their immeasurably greater scale 
of effect and number of adherents. 

And so it has been ever since, up to 
this day. Let us confine our view to our 
own country. Hitherto an element of 
mythology, the stronger and the more 
turbid the better, has been a help rather 
than a hindrance to what are called re- 
ligious causes. To the Calvinists, to 
the Methodists, to the Eevivalists, to 
the Salvation Army, have been the strik- 



236 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

ing effects and the heavy numbers; to 
the Latitude Men, to Leighton, to Ers- 
kine of Linlathen, as to Tauler and his 
friends in the fourteenth century, action 
on a group merely, or on individuals. 
Men such as Butler, or Wilson of Sodor 
and Man, who have had far wider in- 
fluence in our religious world than the 
mystics, and who yet at the same time 
were true ^^ Friends of God'' at heart, 
have owed their wide influence not to 
this character but chiefly to something 
else. The true grandeur of Butler is 
in his sacred horror at the thought **of 
committing the dreadful mistake of 
leaving the course marked out for us 
by nature, whatever that nature may 
be;" his reputation is from his embar- 
rassed and unsatisfying apologetic. 
The true glory of Wilson is his living 
and abiding sense that **sin is against 
nature, therefore sinners can never have 



A ^'FEIEND OF GOD" 237 

^ joy;'- his reputation is as the most 
exemplary of Anglican Churchmen. 

The immense, the epoch-making 
change of our own day, is that a stage 
in our intellectual development is now 
declaring itself when mythology, 
whether moral or immoral, as a basis 
for religion is no longer receivable, is no 
longer an aid to religion but an obstacle. 
Our own nation is not specially lucid, 
it is strongly religious. We have wit- 
nessed in the Salvation Army the spec- 
tacle of one of the crudest and most tur- 
bid developments of religion with the 
element of mythology in full sway; and 
yet it is certain that, even amongst our- 
selves, over all which is most vigorous 
and progressive in our population, myth- 
ology in religion has lost or is fast los- 
ing its power, and that it has no future. 
The gross mob has ever been apt to show 
brutality and hostility towards religion. 



238 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

and demonstrations of this spirit we 
have often enough still. But mingled 
with the mere ignoble and vicious enmity 
against any discipline to raise, restrain, 
and transform, there is also in the com- 
mon people now a sense of impatience 
and anger at what they think futile tri- 
fling with them on the part of those who 
offer to them, in their sore need, the old 
mythological religion — a thing felt to be 
impossible of reception and going if not 
quite gone, incapable of either solving 
the present or founding the future. 

This change is creating a situation 
much more favourable to the mystics. 
Whole libraries of theology have lost 
their interest when it is perceived that 
they make mythology the basis of re- 
ligion, and that to take seriously this 
mythology is impossible. But for those 
groups and individuals, little regarded 
in their day, whom their heart prompted 
to rest religion on natural truth rather 



A ^^ FRIEND OF GOD'' 239 

than on mythology, the hour of hearing 
and of well-inclined attention has at last 
come. For a long while it was heavily 
against them that they merely preached 
the following of Christ, instead of the 
article of justification, the article of 
election ; now at last it is in their favour. 
Let me be candid. I love the mystics, 
but what I find best in them is their 
golden single sentences, not the whole 
conduct of their argument and result 
of their work. I should mislead the 
reader if I led him to suppose that he 
will find any great body of discourse in 
the work attributed to Tauler, The 
FoUoiving of Christ, which Mr. Morell 
has translated, of like value with the de- 
tached sentences from it which I have 
quoted above. But the little book is 
well worth reading if only for the sake 
of such sentences. The general argu- 
ment, too, if not complete and satisfy- 
ing, has an interest of its own from the 



240 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

natural, or, as we nowadays say, the 
positive point of view taken by the au- 
thor, without regard to mythology, or 
conventions, or shams, in Carlyle's 
phrase, of any kind. 

For instance, the book developes the 
idea of following Christ, and teaches 
how for him who would follow Christ, 
poverty, both inward and outward, is 
necessary. Christ's is emphatically a 
^'poor life." Yet to follow him and his 
life is really to follow nature, to be 
happy. And to enter into the kingdom 
of heaven is really nothing else than this 
following him, this following nature, 
this being happy. When Jesus said: 
' ' How hardly shall they that have riches 
enter into the kingdom of heaven, '' this 
was, in our mystic's view, but another 
way of saying: '^How hardly shall 
they that have riches follow me and my 
life, live naturally, be happy." The life 
poor in external goods, as Christ's was, 



A *^FEIEND OF GOD'' 241 

is therefore, concludes our mystic, the 
happy, natural life, the life to be pre- 
ferred. 

But the official and current religion 
interprets Christ's words, as we all 
know, in quite another fashion, and 
makes him in fact say: ^*If you trust 
in riches, if you make a bad use of 
riches, you cannot enter after death in- 
to the paradise above the sky." Now 
I do not at present inquire whether the 
doctrine of our mystic is right or wrong, 
adequate or inadequate. But it is well 
to remark how much nearer, at any rate, 
he comes to the mind of Christ, how 
much more sincerely and faithfully he 
interprets it, than our official religion 
does. For undoubtedly what Jesus 
meant by the kingdom of God or of 
heaven was the reign of saints, the ideal 
future society on earth. ^^How hardly 
shall they that have riches be fit for the 
society of the future," was what he in 



242 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

fact said. One who is unfit for this ideal 
society does not follow Christ ; he is also 
in conflict with nature, cannot be happy. 
This is the doctrine of Jesus, and our 
mystic has rightly seized it. Jesus 
threw out the doctrine and left it to bear 
fruit. It has worked in many and many 
an individual mind since, and will work 
more and more. The worldly them- 
selves have to deal with it. They can 
free themselves from all concern about 
the paradise above the sky, but from 
concern about the society of the future 
they cannot. It will arrive, its begin- 
nings are even now. No one yet, how- 
ever, has disengaged the doctrine from 
difficulty, has so set it forth as to make 
it useable and serviceable ; certainly our 
mystic has not. But to have rightly 
seized it is something. 

Christ's sentence on riches is but a 
corollary from what we call his secret: 
^^He that loveth his life shall lose it, he 



A *^FEIEND OF GOD" 243 

that will lose his life shall save it." 
Now the infinite progress possible in 
Christianity lies in the gradually suc- 
cessful application, to doctrines like this 
secret of Jesus and the corollary from 
it, of what we call his epieikeia, his tem- 
per of sweet reasonableness, consum- 
mate balance, unerring felicity. Al- 
though the application has here not yet 
been successfully made, and the mystics 
have not made it, yet the secret and its 
corollary are unceasingly felt to have in 
them something deeply important, and 
to be full of future; at the same time 
that mythology, like Luther's article of 
justification or Calvin's article of elec- 
tion, is felt to be passing quite away and 
to have no future at all. The mystics, 
then, have the merit of keeping always 
before their minds, and endeavouring 
earnestly to make operative on their 
lives, just that in Christianity which is 
not perishable but abiding. 



244 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

But I ought before I end to let our 
mystic, whether he be indeed Tauler as 
Mr. Morell thinks, or another, to speak 
for himself at more length than I have 
let him speak hitherto. I have men- 
tioned his insistence on external pov- 
erty; let us hear him on internal pov- 
erty, poverty of spirit, ^'a going out of 
yourself and out of everything earthly. ' ' 
A man ^*must perceive and listen to the 
eternal word, and this hearing bringeth 
him to everlasting life. ' ' 

** Through the outer world that men hear, 
they attain to the inner world, which God 
speaketh in the essence of the soul. They 
who have not come to this should hear preach- 
ing, and learn and follow what they hear or 
read ; thus they come to the real truth, and to 
life, which is God. Even if a man is so ad- 
vanced that he hear the word in himself, 
he is yet not at all times prepared for it, 
for bodily nature cannot bear it, and a man 
must sometimes turn to his senses and be ac- 
tive; but he ought to direct this work of the 
senses to the best end. If preaching is use- 



A *^ FRIEND OF GOD" 245 

f ul to him, he can hear it ; if an outward vir- 
tue is useful to him, he can work it; and he 
ought to exercise himself in what he recog- 
nises as the best. But this by no means hin- 
dereth him from hearing the everlasting word, 
but it furthers him to what is best. And he 
should drop and drive out with violence all 
that hindereth him in this. Then he doeth as 
Jesus did in the Temple, when he drove out 
buyers and sellers and said : ' ' My house is a 
house of prayer, but ye have made it a den 
of thieves." A pure heart is a temple of 
God; the tradesm.en whom Jesus drove out 
are the worldly furniture and goods that rust 
in the heart and are hurtful to it. If now 
the heart keepeth the useless thoughts and 
tarrieth over them, it is no longer a house of 
prayer but a den of thieves, for the evil 
thoughts drive out God from his dwelling and 
murder him. But the man who resisteth all 
thoughts that keep him apart from God, re- 
ceiveth from God living, divine power. This 
inpouring is God 's inspeaking, and that is the 
life full of ecstasy and joy." 

The reader will recognise the strain 
of homage which from age to age suc- 
cessive generations of mystics have ever 



246 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

loved to uplift to ^Hhe eternal word.'' 
I will not say that it is entirely satisfy- 
ing, but at least it is always refreshing, 
consoling, and ennobling. 

Whoever turns to the little volume 
which Mr. Morell has translated will 
find plenty in this strain to give him 
refreshment. But he will find more 
than this, he will find sentences such as 
those of which I spoke in beginning, 
and to which in ending I would return; 
isolated sentences fitted to abide in the 
memory, to be a possession for the mind 
and soul, to form the character. *^Sin 
killeth nature, but nature is abhorrent 
of death; therefore sin is against na- 
ture, therefore sinners can never have 
a joy.'' *^They who have left sins and 
come to grace have more delight and 
joy in one day than all sinners have 
ever gained.'' 



AN ETON BOY 



AN ETON BOY 

4 6TT is becoming a mania with him/^ 
X people will say; ''lie has schools 
on the brain!" Yes, I have certainly 
made secondary schools my theme very 
often, and for the public ear the attrac- 
tions of this theme are not inexhaust- 
ible. Perhaps it is time that I quitted 
it, but I should like the leave-taking to 
be a kind one. I have said a great deal 
of harm of English secondary instruc- 
tion. It deserves all the blame that I 
have cast upon it, and I could wish 
everybody to grow more and more im- 
patient of its present condition amongst 
us. Necessarily, as I wished to make 
people dissatisfied with the thing, I 
have insisted upon its faults ; I have in- 
sisted upon the faults of the civilisation 
249 



250 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

which goes along with it, and which is 
in a considerable measure the product 
of it. But our actual secondary 
schools, like our actual civilization, have 
the merit of existing. They are not, 
like all projects for recasting them, an 
ideal; they have the merit of existing. 
They are the modus vivendi, as the 
phrase now is, the schools and the 
civilization are the modus vivendi 
found by our nation for its wants, and 
brought into fact, and shape, and actual 
working. The good which our nation 
has in it, it has put into them, as well 
as the bad. They live by the good in 
them rather than by the bad. At any 
rate, it is to the good which dwells in 
them,, and in the nation which made 
them, that we have to appeal in all our 
projects for raising them, and for bring- 
ing them nearer to the ideal which lovers 
of perfection frame for them. 

Suppose we take that figure we know 



AN ETON BOY 251 

so well, the earnest and nonconforming 
Liberal of our middle classes, as his 
schools and his civilisation have made 
him. He is for disestablishment; he is 
for temperance; he has an eye to his 
wife's sister; he is a member of his 
local caucus ; he is learning to go up to 
Birmingham every year to the feast of 
Mr. Chamberlain. His inadequacy is 
but too visible. Take him, even, 
raised, cleared, refined, ennobled, as we 
see him in Dr. Alexander Raleigh, the 
late well-known Nonconformist minister 
of Stamford Hill, whose memoir has re- 
cently been published. Take Dr. Ea- 
leigh, as he himself would have 
desired to be taken, dilating on a theme 
infinitely precious to him — the world to 
come, **My hope of that world seems 
to be my religion. If I were to lose it, 
this whole life would be overcast in a 
moment with a gloom which nothing 
could disperse. Yet a little while, and 



252 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

we shall be sorrowless and sinless, like 
the angels, like God, and, looking back 
on the struggles and sorrows of earth, 
astonished that things so slight and 
transient could have so much discom- 
posed us.'' This transference of our 
ideal from earth to the sky — this re- 
course, for the fulfilment of our hopes 
and for the realisation of the kingdom 
of God, to a supernatural, future, an- 
gelic, fantastic world — is, indeed, to 
our popular religion the most familiar 
and favourite conception possible. Yet 
it is contrary to the very central thought 
and aim of Jesus; it is a conception 
which, whether in the form of the new 
Jerusalem of popular Judaism, or in 
the form of the glorified and unending 
tea-meeting of popular Protestantism, 
Jesus passed his life in striving to 
transform, and in collision with which 
he met his death. And so long as our 
main stock and force of serious people 



AN ETON BOY 253 

have their minds imprisoned in this 
conception, so long will ' * things so slight 
and transient'' as their politics, their 
culture, their civilisation, be in the state 
in which we see them now: they will 
be narrowed and perverted. Neverthe- 
less, what a store of virtue there is in 
our main body of serious people even 
now, with their minds imprisoned in 
this Judaic conception; what qualities 
of character and energy are in such 
leaders of them as Dr. Ealeigh! Nay, 
what a store of virtue there is even m 
their civilisation itself, narrowed and 
stunted though it be! Imperfect as it 
is, it has founded itself, it has made its 
way, it exists; the good which is in it, 
it has succeeded in bringing forth and 
establishing against a thousand hin- 
drances, a thousand difficulties. We see 
its faults, we contrast it with our ideal; 
but our ideal has not yet done as much. 
And for making itself fact, this civilisa- 



254 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

tion has found in its Judaic conceptions 
tlie requisite guidance and stimulus, 
and probably only in conceptions of this 
kind could it have done so. 

Take, again, that other type which we 
have accustomed ourselves to call, for 
shortness, the Barbarian. Take it first 
in its adult and rigid stage, devoid of 
openness of mind, devoid of flexibility, 
with little culture and with no ideas, 
considerably materialised, staunch for 
^^our traditional, existing social ar- 
rangements,'' fiercely ready with the 
reproach of *^ revolution'' and ** athe- 
ism" against all its disturbers. Evi- 
dently this is the very type of personage 
for which Jesus declared entrance to 
the kingdom of God to be well-nigh 
impossible. Take this type in its far 
more amiable stage, with the beauty 
and freshness of youth investing it; 
take it unspoiled, gay, brave, spirited, 
generous; take it as the Eton boy. 



AN ETON BOY 255 

'*As Master of the Beagles/' so testifies 
the admiring record of such a boy in 
the Eton College Chronicle, ''he showed 
himself to possess all the qualities of a 
keen sportsman, with an instinctive 
knowledge of the craft." The aged 
Barbarian will, upon this, admiringly 
mumble to us his story how the battle 
of Waterloo was won in the playing- 
fields of Eton. Alas! disasters have 
been prepared in those playing-fields as 
well as victories; disasters due to in- 
adequate mental training — to want of 
application, knowledge, intelligence, lu- 
cidity. The Eton playing-fields have 
their great charms, notwithstanding; 
but with what felicity of unconscious 
satire does that stroke of *^the Master 
of the Beagles" hit off our whole sys- 
tem of provision of public secondary 
schools; a provision for the fortunate 
and privileged few, but for the many, 
for the nation, ridiculously impossible! 



256 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

And yet, as we said of the Philistine and 
his civilisation, so we may say of the 
Barbarian and his civilisation also: 
What merits they have, what a store of 
virtue! First of all, they have the 
grand merit of existing, of having — un- 
like our ideal society of the future — 
advanced out of the state of prospectus 
into the state of fact. They have in 
great part created the modus vivendi by 
which our life is actually carried for- 
ward, and by which England is what it 
is. In the second place, they have in- 
trinsic merits of nature and character; 
and by these, indeed, have mainly done 
their work in the world. Even the 
adult and rigid Barbarian has often in- 
valuable qualities. It is hard for him, 
no doubt, to enter into the kingdom of 
God — ^hard for him to believe in the 
sentiment of the ideal life transforming 
the life which now is, to believe in it 
and come to serve it — hard, but not im- 



AN ETON BOY 257 

possible. And in the young the qual- 
ities take a brighter colour, and the rich 
and magical time of youth adds graces 
of its own to them; and then, in happy 
natures, they are irresistible. In a na- 
ture of this kind I propose now to show 
them. 

The letters and diary of an Eton boy, 
a young lieutenant in the army who died 
of dysentery in South Africa, came the 
other day into my hands. They have 
not been published, but they were 
printed as a record of him for his family 
and his friends. He had been with his 
regiment little more than a year; the 
letters and diary extend over a space of 
less than two months. I fell in, by 
chance, with the slight volume which is 
his memorial, and his name made me 
look through the pages; for the name 
awakened reminiscences of distant Ox- 
ford days, when I had known it in 
another generation. The passing atten- 



258 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

tion which his name at first drew was 
presently fixed and charmed by what I 
read. I have received permission to 
give to the public some notice of the 
slight and unpretending record which 
thus captivated my interest. 

Arthur Clynton Baskerville Mynors 
was born in 1856, of a Herefordshire 
family. His bringing-up was that of an 
English boy in an English country house. 
In January, 1870, he went to Eton, and 
left at Election, 1875. **His life here,'' 
says the short record of him in the Eton 
College Chronicle, **was always joyous, 
a fearless keen boyhood, spent sans peur 
et sans reproche. Many will remember 
him as fleet of foot and of lasting pow- 
ers, winning the mile and the steeple- 
chase in 1874, and the walking race in 
1875. As Master of the Beagles in 1875 
he showed himself to possess all the 
qualities of a keen sportsman, with an 
instinctive knowledge of the craft." 



AN ETON BOY 259 

After leaving Eton he joined the Ox- 
ford militia, and at the beginning of 
1878 obtained a commission in the 60th 
Rifles. He had been just a year with 
his battalion when it was sent to South 
Africa. He sailed on the 19th of Feb- 
ruary, and on the 25th of April he died 
of dysentery at Fort Pearson, Natal. 
For these two months we have his let- 
ters and diary, written to his father and 
mother at home. I wish to let him tell 
his own story as far as possible, and we 
will begin with his first letter. 

*' * Dublin Castle,' February 20th. 
**My Dear Papa, 

*'We were all safe on board last night, and 
steamed down the Thames, and anchored for 
the night. The boat is a beautiful one, it 
goes very smooth as yet; we have passed 
Dover and Folkestone, and are now off Dunge- 
ness. To-night we reach Dartmouth at 
twelve, and wait till twelve next day. There 
is an oudacioiis crowd on board with all the 
men, and nothing to do. The cabins we sleep 
in are the most extraordinary, two of us, bed 



260 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

and all, in a place about as big as the dining- 
room table at home, and when it's rough, as 
far as I can see, we must tumble out ; still, it 
is rather fun. The skipper is a first-rate fel- 
low, lets us do what we like on board. He 
expects we shall get to Natal about the 18th 
or 19th of next month; we are sailing about 
eleven knots an hour, I wish we were going 
faster. It is very windy and cold on deck; 
the band played, which enlivened us a little. 
We have mess as usual, only at six o 'clock. I 
have fitted all my things on your belt, and 
they do capitally. Please give my love to 
mamma and everybody that is staying at 
Durrant's, especially Aunt Ellen, and thank 
them all for everything they have given me. 
We stop at Madeira, when I will write to you 
again; so good-bye till then. 

"Ever your most affectionate son, 

' ' Arthur. ' ' 

The next letter is written four days 
later. 

" 'Dublin Castle,' February 24th. 
"My Dear Mamma, 

"Many thanks for your letters, which I 
found waiting at Dartmouth, where we ar- 
rived after rather a rough voyage. There 



AN ETON BOY 261 

were no end of people there assembled to see 
us off, and when we started we were lustily 
cheered by crowds on the shore; the band 
played 'Should old acquaintance/ &c., and 
we soon lost sight of England. Friday night 
everybody was ill, as the sea was rough. Sat- 
urday, in the Bay of Biscay, it was awful; 
the waves were mountains high — a grand 
sight — so much so, that the upper decks were 
washed over by the sea all day. I was aw- 
fully ill; in fact, so was everybody. On Sat- 
urday morning at 4 a. m. I was on watch ; 
luckily for me it was much calmer. I found 
two of the horses had died in the night, and 
that several hammocks and other things had 
been washed overboard. I was awfully glad 
when we got out of the Bay. I'll never go to 
sea again if I can help it. Sunday was bright 
and sunny; everybody came up on deck after 
the bad weather, and we had quite a jolly day, 
steaming with a strong wind behind at about 
twelve and a half miles, or knots I should say, 
an hour. I was on duty that day. We con- 
signed the poor horses to the deep. This 
morning was lovely, and we had a regular 
tropical shower, the weather, by-the-bye, get- 
ting much warmer. It's most absurd, since 
we started none of us have shaved; we are 
(not myself) all growing beards. It is aw- 



262 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

fully slow, nothing to do but read. The men 
also have nothing to do. I wish we were at 
Natal, I do so detest the sea. It keeps very 
rough all the time, and the ship rolls horri- 
bly. The men have an awfully bad time of 
it ; packed so close, they have scarcely room to 
breathe. All the officers and passengers have 
dinner, &c., together, down-stairs, in a stuffy 
place, not so bad to look at, but when it is 
full of sickly females, and no one in the best 
of humours, it's perfectly unbearable. Still 
we live in hopes of getting to Natal soon, 
where I hope we shall have some better fun. 
We get to Madeira to-morrow night at ten 
o'clock, and wait for about three hours for 
stores and the mails. I sent you a picture of 
the vessel. I hope you got it safe. I hope 
you were none the worse for waiting in the 
cold and seeing me off at Tilbury. I have 
no more to say, but, with best love to papa 
and all, 

"I am ever, dear Mamma, 

''Your affectionate son, 

*' Arthur.'' 

Madeira is reached and left ; they have 
a week ** awfully hot," during which **I 
have been learning signalling, which will 



AN ETON BOY 263 

probably come in useful in the bush.'^ 
The line has now been crossed, they are 
approaching Cape Town. 

*'It has been getting much cooler the last 
few days, and to-day quite a breeze and rather 
rough ; the ship is getting lighter, and conse- 
quently rolls more. We had some pistol 
practising yesterday, and a nigger entertain- 
ment last night, which was great fun. I 
spend the day mostly in reading, but it is 
awfully slow, nothing to do. . . . So far, 
we have had a capital passage, but the trade 
winds are dead against us now. I wonder 
how you are all getting on; you will soon 
begin fishing at Aberedw. Have the hounds 
had any sport, and how are grandpapa and 
grandmamma? Please let granny have my 
letter, and tell her I would write, only one 
letter answers the purpose as there is so little 
to say; but I want lots of letters, to hear what 
is going on at home and at Bosbury. We are 
all ready to land at Natal; all our weapons 
are as sharp as needles. I wish we were 
there. You will hear plenty of news (even if 
I don't write often, as there may be no way 
of conveying the letters), as there are three 
correspondents going up to the front. The 



264 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

Graphic correspondent has taken one or two 
drawings of our men on board ship, so you 
may see them; I advise you to take it in. I 
have written very badly, but must make ex- 
cuse that the sea is rough to-day. Remind 
Charles about planting the gorse in the cock- 
shoots, where the trees are bitten off by the 
rabbits. I don't fancy the mosquitoes in 
Natal. I believe there are swarms of them 
there, so I am going to buy a mosquito net 
at Cape Town. My next letter will probably 
be from Durban, in a week's time or so." 

*^For something to do," he copies out, 
to send with this letter, the verses writ- 
ten by a passenger on the burial of a 
private soldier who died on board. 
Then comes Cape Town, ^ ' a horrid place, 
very hot and dirty," but with the Table 
Mountain to make amends; ^^the rocks 
were rather like the Craigy rocks, only 
much larger and bolder." Then Cape 
Town is left, and they are in the last 
stage of their voyage. 

''On Sunday morning I went to church at 
the cathedral, rather a fine building for Cape 



AN ETON BOY 265 

Town. Had to go on board at one o'clock, 
and we sailed at two o 'clock. We passed the 
Cape of Good Hope about six o'clock in the 
afternoon. The coast all along looked rugged 
and bare, very mountainous in the back- 
ground, and rocks jutting boldly out. 
Bounding the point, the sea became very 
rough, and has been ever since. At dinner 
nothing can stand up, knives, forks, tumblers, 
bottles, everything sent flying about. There 
are no end of porpoises and dolphins all along 
the coast; they come swimming and jumping 
by the side of the vessel. Rounded Cape 
D'Agulhas about three in the morning; only 
saw the lighthouse. Monday was still rough, 
and we kept in sight of shore all day. We 
practised revolver-shooting most of the after- 
noon. To-day it rained all the morning 
. . . the country opposite us looks much 
flatter, and is quite green on the slopes of the 
hills. We amuse ourselves by looking 
through our field-glasses at the shore — we are 
now about three miles from it; enormous 
great sand-hills along the beach, and woody 
at the back. We have seen a few houses and 
some cattle, otherwise the country looks unin- 
habited. We passed Algoa Bay this morning. 
. . . I shall be very glad when we have 
landed, as this is the slowest work I ever went 



266 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

through in my life ; we sail along pretty fast, 
do about two hundred and seventy to three 
hundred miles in twenty-four hours. Another 
of the horses is very ill from the rough 
weather; I expect he will die before he gets 
on shore. The men and officers are none the 
worse for the journey, but I expect we shall 
get very foot-sore at first. We are in awfully 
bad training, as we can't get any exercise. 
How is poor old Martha? Give her my love. 
I suppose you are just beginning summer; 
here the winter is beginning. I believe in the 
winter-time there is no rain at all." 

On Friday, the 21st of March, they 
are at Durban, and in tents; ^^the coun- 
try looks beautiful; like Wales, only all 
the hills are bush." On Saturday they 
start to relieve Colonel Pearson, sur- 
rounded by the Zulus at Fort Ekowe. 
On Saturday, the 22nd, ^^went by train 
twelve miles, encamped, had dinner in 
dark ; slept four hours, up at two o 'clock 
in the dark." Then a diary gives a, 
record of the march, 



AN ETON BOY 267 

^^ Sunday morning. — Started at 4 a. m., to 
march in utter darkness; unpitched camp, 
packed up and off; marched six miles on aw- 
ful bad road to Verulam ; the hilliest and pret- 
tiest country I ever saw; forded two rivers; 
stopped eight hours at Verulam; bathed, 
washed my clothes, and started at three o 'clock 
p. M., our baggage drawn by oxen, sixteen to 
twenty oxen in each waggon. "Went to church 
at Yerulam. Niggers awful-looking beasts, 
tall, strong, and active ; wear no clothes at all, 
except very few round the waist. The bat- 
talion bathed in the Umhloti River. No more 
news about the war. Weather very hot from 
9 A. M. till 3 p. M. The march to Victoria was 
fearful, dreadfully hot; the sun right on our 
heads; and carrying our ammunition and 
arms, almost heart-breaking. We got there 
just in time to see to pitch our tents and tum- 
ble into bed for a few hours, and on 

^^ Monday nfiorning. — Up at 2 :20 in the 
dark, see nothing and find nothing; started, 
crossed and bathed in the Tongaati, up to our 
waists crossing, so wet and wretched. One 
halt for mid-day in Compensation Flat in the 
sun, no shade to be found and no rest ; waited 
till 2 :30 and marched nine miles, the longest 
and weariest I ever marched; the men were 



268 ESSAYS IN CKITICISM 

almost dead with heat. Had only coffee and 
tea twice a day, and nothing else, unless we 
passed a public-house or shed, which were few 
and far between; and then what we bought 
was awfully dear. Still we scrape along ; and 
at last at seven o 'clock we got to our camping- 
place; put tents up in the dark; had some 
salt tinned beef and muddy water, and went 
to bed. Up next morning at 2:30 to a min- 
ute; lowered and packed our tents and off at 
4 A. M. ; crossed and bathed in the Umhali, 
which, we being pretty dirty from heat, re- 
freshed us much ; and then encamped at eight 
o'clock at the Umvoti River, up to our knees. 
Very, very hot; we washed some of our 
clothes, and this time a native who owned a 
mill was very kind and gave us some beer. 
We boiled our tinned meat and made soup; 
started much refreshed, and in much better 
spirits. The country very hilly and hot; In- 
dian corn up to one's head in the fields. 
Some plantations of sugar-cane also in the 
country, which, when picked, was sweet and 
juicy. The Zulus or niggers here are scarcely 
human beings; naked and their skins like 
leather; awful beasts to look at and very 
hideous. This afternoon we passed Stanger 
Camp, and halted a mile and a half from the 
camp. The men just beginning to get into 



AN ETON BOY 269 

condition again; since tliey left the ship they 
had been in very bad training for marching, 
owing to no exercise on board ship. Next 
morning we got up at 2:45, and down tents, 
and crossed a river (shoes and stockings off), 
and marched by New Gelderland about seven 
or eight miles by seven o'clock, and encamped 
by the Monoti River, where alligators and hip- 
popotami are numerous; we bathed notwith- 
standing. It was hotter than ever ; the coun- 
try beautiful and hilly; no fences; mostly 
grass about as high as your thigh. We heard 
yesterday that the column going to relieve 
Pearson had crossed the Tugela, and was 
waiting for us before starting. . . . We 
shall cross the Tugela to-morrow. 

Thursday, 27th. — A spy was caught yester- 
day at Fort Pearson in the camp. No one 
knows where the Zulu armies are; one day 
they are seen at one place, another at another ; 
one meal lasts them for three days, and the 
bush they can creep through like snakes. Be- 
ing nothing but Zulus (natives) about the 
country here, they come and watch us; in 
fact, they know everything that goes on. 
They are awfully wily; they are never to be 
caught in an open country, and never will be 
unless at Undini ; the only time they will at- 
tack their enemy is before daybreak, and at 



270 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

night when we encamp, and then they won't 
attack a very big force. 

* ' My dear papa and mamma, I send you my 
diary. ' ' 

Finding that they have still to wait a 
day at Fort Pearson, he writes a letter 
to accompany his diary, and gives an 
account of the military situation. 

*'We shall cross the river to-morrow or next 
day, and then we relieve Pearson. They can 
signal from here to them. Pearson says he is 
pretty well off, but has nine officers and one 
hundred and fifty men ill with dysentery. 
When Pearson is relieved, we by ourselves 
stay here; the other regiments return and 
make a depot between Fort Pearson and 
Ekowe, where Pearson is encamped, and carry 
stores and provisions there; then we shall 
march to Undini, the king 's kraal. At first it 
is a pretty clear road to Pearson, but after- 
wards there is a large bush which we have to 
get through to get at him. "We shall be at 
Ekowe for about three weeks. We are about 
four miles from the sea, and the river is about 
a quarter of a mile across. Everything looks 
like business. Colonel Hopton, when we 



AN ETON BOY 271 

march up, remains in command here, and at 
Fort Tenedos, the other side of the river. I 
saw him this morning; he asked after every- 
body at home. It is very jolly getting here, 
and having a day's rest, and some bread and 
fresh meat. All in very good spirits. Every- 
thing I have, and the rest of us, is washing 
and drying. My camp equipage is first rate— 
everything I want. The Zulus are very fine 
men, use assegaies and rifles of some sort. 
They treat the wounded fearfully ; spear them 
through and through— at least, their women 
do. I enclose my diary of the month as I 
have no time to copy it." 

On Friday, the 28th of March, the 
Tugela is crossed, and the diary recom- 
mences. 

**We crossed the Tugela, being towed across. 
The men bivouacked and spent an awful night 
in pouring rain. Colonel Hopton gave me a 
bed in his tent. Most of the officers stood up 
in the rain all night. Next day, 

Saturdaij, March 29th.— We started for 
Ekowe and marched about twelve miles. The 
column was five to six miles long, and we went 
awfully slow. There we laagered with shel- 
ter-trench outside. It would have taken 



272 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

100,000 Zulus to take it. I and Keith (Tur- 
nour) on outpost duty all night (blue funk), 
and both tired and wet. Luckily no enemy 
came. Eeturned to camp tired, after the col- 
umn had marched off. 

Sunday, March 30th. — Started at ten. 
Much delay caused by waggons crossing a 
brook. Warm march. Burnt a lot of kraals 
on the way. Enemy flying in small detach- 
ments. Arrived at Amatakula River, one mile 
from river on Natal side. Great bother about 
laager being put up, and much confusion. 
Early to bed. Bright moonlight till twelve. 

Monday, March 31st. — Under arms at four, 
expecting attack early. Enemy moving. 
Very hot; no wind; no shade. A buck ran 
into camp this morning and was assegaied, 
after much sport amongst the natives. Ru- 
mour of Cetewayo having offered peace; not 
believed, one word of it. Got into camp about 
5 :30, where we bivouacked. 

Tuesday, April 1st. — Under arms at four. 
Marched about eight o'clock with great care, 
Zulus having been seen by scouts hovering 
about. This morning the order of advance 
was — 



AN ETON BOY 273 

''The sailors with a Gat ling and rocket. 

' ' Ourselves. 

' ' Our train. 
"Rear guard, 99th. 
"Marines and 91st. 
"Two Regiments of Natives, 
protecting our waggons on the flanks. We 
were drawn up ready to receive the enemy 
twice, but they retreated. We reached our 
camping-place about four o 'clock ; laagered as 
usual, and made entrenchments round it, only 
making them nearly double the height. About 
one hour after we got in, it began to thunder, 
and the rain came down in torrents, wetting 
us through. Our feet had been wet for the 
last two days ; in fact, we are never dry. No 
clothes to change, or anything, as now we have 
only got with us what we have got on, a mack- 
intosh sheet, and a great-coat. We slept as 
well as we could. Had the sentries doubled, 
the enemy being expected to attack us next 
morning. 

Wednesday, April 2nd. — Under arms at 
four ; and just as day was beginning to break, 
our pickets reported the enemy advancing. 
Everything was got into readiness; the 
trenches manned; the pickets recalled. We 
saw the enemy coming out of a dingle in files. 



274 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

and, opening out, they surrounded us in most 
splendid skirmishing order. The bravest fel- 
lows I ever saw. Our face was attacked first, 
as they had not had time to get round to the 
other side. At about 6:20 the first shot was 
fired, and soon all our men were blazing away ; 
shots whizzing over our heads, the Gatling at 
the corner pounding it into them. They ad- 
vanced at the double, creeping in shelter of 
the grass. We were so strong they could do 
nothing. Still they advanced within twenty 
yards, where afterwards some were picked up 
dead. Our men were awfully frightened and 
nervous at first, could not even speak, and 
shivered from funk; so we, the officers, had 
enough to do to keep the men cool. We re- 
pulsed them in about twenty minutes ; whilst 
on our flanks and rear, where the other regi- 
ments were, the battle was still going on. 
Two of our companies were then taken round 
to relieve the other side, one of which was 
mine, so we marched under their fire to the 
rear face, and acted as a support. It was soon 
all over. We repulsed them on all sides. The 
native cavalry and native contingent were 
then let loose to pursue them ; which they did, 
assegaieing most of the wounded on their way 
and not doing much damage to the enemy. 
There ought to have been a great many more 



AN ETON BOY 275 

killed^ but all the men were nervous and ex- 
cited, and had not been under fire before. We 
counted and buried four hundred and seventy- 
six, but a great many were found the same 
day by our scouts, wounded and hiding in 
bushes some miles off. We finished at about 
7 :10, and the rest of the day we were burying 
them, and our own five poor fellows, and one 
officer, Johnson, of the 99th. I think we had 
thirty wounded. In our regiment one man 
was killed ; he was in my company — shot right 
through the head ; and Colonel Northey badly 
wounded, the shot entering at the shoulder 
and lodging itself in his back. It was got 
out. He is very weak; I only hope he may 
recover. Three other men in the regiment 
were wounded. It was a fearful sight — so 
many of these brave chaps lying about, dead 
and covered with blood and gore. They must 
have had a great many more wounded, whom 
they took away with them. I myself did not 
quite like the first few shots as they whizzed 
about over our heads, but found I had such a 
lot to do to keep the men in order and telling 
them when to shoot, that I did not mind it 
a bit." 

This was the affair, or ^ ^battle,'' of 
Ginghilovo; and surely never was such 



276 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

an affair described with a more pre- 
possessing simplicity, modesty, and hu- 
manity. The next day, the 3rd of April, 
Ekowe was reached and Pearson re- 
lieved. On the 5th of April young 
Mynors with his battalion marched back 
to the scene of their recent action, Gin- 
ghilovo, where a fort was to be estab- 
lished for a base of operations. And 
now, with the common mention of bad 
weather and trying climate, comes the 
ominous mention of sickness also. 

Saturday, April 5th. — We left Ekowe quite 
empty, having burnt the king's brother's 
kraal the day before. We halted for two 
hours, as our line of waggons with Pearson's 
was so long. It was awfully hot. The coun- 
try is perfectly lovely; such grass and woods, 
hills, most beautiful flowers and trees ; if only 
inhabited, it would be one of the most charm- 
ing countries in the world. The climate is 
bad. So hot in the day-time and cold at night. 
Dew like rain. I saw, on our route to-day, 
after halting in the sun for a couple of hours, 
six or seven fellows fall out from sunstroke. 



AN ETON BOY 277 

Sunday, April 6th.— Poor Colonel Northey 
died. We had a scare, or rather false alarm, 
at about 3 :30 in the morning. Colonel Pem- 
berton has got dysentery. We began half -ra- 
tions to-day. Men not in good health." 

That night the second instalment of 
diary is sent off by the courier from 
Ginghilovoj with a letter of a few lines, 
written by moonlight. *'I hope this will 
find you all well at home. Here there is 
nothing but hard work, and very little 
to eat from morning till night. I am 
afraid it will be a long affair.^' The 
same Sunday night the diary is re- 
sumed. 

'^GiNGHiLOVo. — We came back here in the 
morning, after leaving Pearson to our right, 
who was going straight back to the Tu- 
gela to recruit his troops. We encamped 
about three-quarters of a mile from where we 
had had our battle. Passing the ground the 
stench was fearful, owing to natives who had 
dragged themselves off and died. 

Monday, April 7th. — Colonel Pemberton 
still remains on the sick Ust; and several of 



278 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

the officers have been suffering more or less 
from diarrhoea, caused by bad water. In my 
last letter I said we were on half -rations ; but 
it only lasted for about two days, as we have 
got some more sent us. In the afternoon we 
moved up a small hill into a first-rate position, 
but water bad and a mile off, and even that 
not likely to last long. We have also on the 
next hill another laager for the natives and 
bullocks. It is, of course, a necessity to keep 
them out of the camp, because they make the 
place smell so. In the day-time it is awfully 
hot, the sun having such power ; and at night 
cool, and very heavy dews wet you through 
if you did not wear a mackintosh. The men 
begin to improve in spirits, but it will be 
awfully slow here for a fortnight on the salt- 
est of pork and hard biscuit, pork unfit to 
eat. 

Wednesday, April 9th. — I was on duty from 
3 to 4 A. M. Another scorching-hot day. A 
great deal of long grass has been burnt about 
the country, of course by the Zulus. Captain 
Tufnell — who was assuming command of the 
regiment, as we had no other officers — also 
very ill. We sit in the shade under the wag- 
gons out of the sun. Of course we cannot go 
much more than a couple of hundred yards 



AN ETON BOY 279 

from the camp, except in small parties, so we 
find it rather dull. I got your letter from 
Mereworth, and was very glad to get it; al- 
ways like having as much news as possible, 
as we seldom see a paper. ... I walked 
round our new fort this afternoon. It is very 
strong, so to say, and would keep any Zulu 
army in the world off. 

Thursday, April 10th. — My company was on 
outpost duty, so I was out all day long, and 
did not do much but keep a look-out. Most 
of the troops suffering from dysentery and 
want of sustenance. We expect a convoy 
soon, as we have only six days' more pro- 
visions. Awfully hot again to-day. The 
country all round our fort is more or less plain 
to the N., S., and E., where the King feeds 
his cattle. To the W. it is very mountainous, 
very like Scotland, only hills, I should say, 
higher. We see the Zulu fires at night in the 
distance. I wish we could get from here, but 
I believe we have to wait until all the forces 
are ready to advance. I don't know whether 
I told you about the native contingent. They 
are all black like niggers, and awful-looking 
beasts; have scarcely any clothes on at all. 
They are armed with rifles, but are very bad 
shots; the only good they are is after a vie- 



280 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

tory to pursue the enemy, as they are very 
active ; also they do not make bad scouts ; they 
are very sharp-sighted, and can hear very 
quickly. We must in the end give the Zulus 
a thrashing, but the hard thing is to find 
them. We can never attack them, because we 
don 't know where they are, and they will take 
good care only to attack us when we are in 
the bush or crossing rivers, and perhaps at 
night. When they advance at close quarters, 
they come like cavalry ; but of course any Eng- 
lish army can stop them if properly handled. 
**Now, my dear papa and mamma, I must 
finish off. I hope this will catch the mail on 
Tuesday. I hope all the farms, &c., are doing 
well. With very best love to all, Martha, Jub- 
ber, and Pussy, 

''I am, ever your affectionate son, 

'^ Arthur.*' 

On the night of Saturday, the 12th of 
April, poor boy, after being on duty all 
the previous day, Good Friday, *4n the 
other laager where the niggers live," 
he was himself seized by sickness. On 
the 13th he writes home : — 

*'I was taken awfully seedy in the night 



AN ETON BOY 281 

with diarrhoea, and to-day, Easter Sunday, I 
was obliged to go on the sick list, as my com- 
plaint had turned more to dysentery. The 
bad water and lowering food and bad climate 
are enough to kill anybody; still we struggle 
on, the same for everybody. Our native run- 
ners who take the post w^ere yesterday chased 
on their way to the Tugela, and had to return 
here. A convoy with provisions has arrived 
here all safe ; so far so good, as long as it lasts. 
We expect to be here a month or six weeks 
doing nothing, unless we have to alter the po- 
sition of our fort owing to the scarcity of 
water. The nights get colder, and the sun is 
hotter than any English sun in the day-time. 
. . . When we left England we were 700 
strong, and now we figure about 628, caused 
mostly by men gone to hospital. Some two or 
three of our cattle die every night, also a horse 
or two ; consequently, being only just covered 
with earth for burial, there are numerous un- 
healthy smells. I tried to get leave with Hut- 
ton to go shooting some buck which had been 
seen, but was refused as not being safe. We 
got our first English papers on Thursday, and 
very glad we were to get them. By-the-bye, 
have you been fishing, and what sport? 
Please tell me everything. How are grand- 
mamma and grandpapa ? I have not heard of 



282 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

or from them. I hope you send them my 
scribbles; I daresay they are very hard to 
make out, but having only a blanket and 
sheet (waterproof) with us, there is very little 
paper to be got. What I write with now is 
a pen I bought, which you dip in water and 
it writes as you see. How is Jubber, and how 
is Edmund Carew? The Zulus around us 
amuse themselves by burning grass, I suppose 
with the idea to starve our cattle. Lord 
Chelmsford has gone back to Durban. All 
the troops have arrived safe, the 17th only 
losing three horses on their journey. The 
niggers brought us in some sweet potatoes yes- 
terday which are horrible things, still they 
are of the vegetable description. . . . The 
Colonel is still suffering from dysentery, also 
Tufnell; so Cramer, the second captain, is in 
command of us. I should very much like to 
have the Hereford Times forwarded to me, as 
it would give me all the county news. We 
had service this morning for the first time 
since we left the 'Dublin Castle'; every other 
Sunday we have been marching. We killed 
an enormous snake the other day, about five 
or six feet long. Two rhinoceroses have been 
seen near here feeding; I wish I could get a 
shot at them, but can't get leave to get out. 
Has Colonel Price had much sport with the 



AN ETON BOY 283 

hounds, and how are all the horses, colts, 
mares, &c. ? How does the Cwm get on; I 
wish I was there ; also the ravens, everything ? 
Colonel Northey is a great loss; he was mar- 
ried, too, and his wife a very nice person. 
Tell grandpapa I find the little book he gave 
me very useful; also your Bible, which I al- 
ways carry with me. To-day is Easter Sun- 
day, and a convoy has just been sighted ; they 
say we shall get the mail. I know I am writ- 
ing great bosh, but have nothing else to do. 
If you happen to see Mr. Walsh, please thank 
him for my revolver ; I find it very useful, and 
it shoots first rate, also remember me to Aunt 
Ellen, and tell her she does not know how 
much I am indebted to her. . . . Several 
fellows have followed my idea of writing a 
diary and posting it; it seems very lazy and 
undutiful of me, but it is perhaps better than 
nothing. I do wish you could be here for a 
day or two to see the country, and the trees 
and shrubs that grow wild, just like a flower 
garden. I should say the grass here is better 
for feeding than any in England, one could 
easily mow three or four crops of hay in the 
year. The only thing, or one of the few 
things, the Zulus cultivate is Indian corn, what 
they call mealies; also a few fields of sugar- 
cane here and there. We are not many miles 



284 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

from the sea, as we can hear it when the wind 
is the right way, from six to ten miles I dare- 
say. 

Monday. — Convoy arrived all safe last 
night. By the mail poor Keith Turnour heard 
he had lost his father. I was awfully sorry, 
as I could not do any work, being still on the 
sick list. My dysentery still sticks to me with 
bad pain in my inside, but I feel otherwise 
well in myself. I slept under a cart last night 
— quite a luxury, as it keeps the dew off. To- 
day we are burning the grass round our 
laager, so that the Zulus cannot set fire to it 
and attack us at the same time. The men 
have had fresh meat the last two days, as sev- 
eral bullocks have come up from Tugela. 
They are killed at eight in the morning, and 
eaten at one. We got some jam up last night, 
so we are doing pretty well now. The only 
thing I wish is that the Zulus would attack us 
again. It is getting quite slow doing noth- 
ing. Captain Tufnell is off the sick list to- 
day, and takes command of the regiment. 
How are Uncle Tom and Aunt Conty getting 
on ? Having no end of fun, I '11 be bound. 
Our laager is about twenty miles from Fort 
Pearson on the Tugela, and sixteen miles from 
the now abandoned Ekowe, which we can see 
with our telescopes. We are all becoming 



AN ETON BOY 285 

very learned cooks, as we cook all our meat, 
salt meat, &c., make soup and different things 
of them. The worst of it is we have very few 
materials to cook in, mostly provided by the 
waggon conductors. We made some mealie 
cakes of Indian com, which were first rate at 
the time, but awfully indigestible afterwards ; 
I'm afraid the fault of the cooking; I wish 
I had taken lessons from Miles before I left. 

Tuesday, April 15th.— The convoy of empty 
waggons left at six to go to Tugela. Spent a 
very bad night, suffering from diarrhoea, and 
felt much weaker to-day ; still I hope I shall 
get over it soon. Some of the fellows got 
leave to shoot, and they shot five golden 
plovers, or grey kind of plovers, which are 
very acceptable to our larder. I felt awfully 
dull, nothing to do but sit under a cart out of 
the sun and try to sleep. The scouts went out 
some six or seven miles to-day and burnt sev- 
eral kraals. Four Zulu women and a boy were 
brought in yesterday, the most hideous crea- 
tures I ever saw, more like wild animals. I 
am going to post my letter to-night, so as to 
be certain to catch the mail. I hope you are 
all well, and love to everybody. 

'*Ever your most affectionate son, 

' ' Arthur. ' ' 
p^ S __I was very glad to get a letter from 



286 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

you and papa last night, of March 11th. I 
am exceedingly sorry to hear of grand- 
mamma's attack. It must indeed have been 
very serious. I only hope she may recover 
for some time, and be well when I get home 
again. I had rather a better night last night, 
but am still very weak. Sorry to hear 'Mas- 
querade' is a roarer. Have not had grand- 
papa's and Elinor's letters yet: must have 
missed the mail." 

He never got home, and he wrote no 
more; the cold nights, and heavy dews, 
and suns ^* hotter than any English 
sun, ' ' had done their work. On the 24th 
of April he was sent to the hospital at 
Fort Pearson, where Colonel Hopton, a 
Herefordshire neighbour, was in com- 
mand ; the poor boy died on the day fol- 
lowing, and in a letter to his father 
Colonel Hopton relates the end. 

*' Yesterday morning I got a note from an 
officer of the 60th, Gunning, who appears to 
have been told by Arthur that he knew me, 
informing me that he, Arthur, was very ill 
with dysentery, and that the doctor had sent 



AN ETON BOY 287 

him to Fort Pearson in hopes that the change 
of air would do him good, and asking me to 
meet the convoy on arrival here and get Ar- 
thur at once into the hospital. I met the 
empty convoy of waggons last evening, as they 
approached our camp, and got the one with 
Arthur in it over the river (Tugela) as soon 
as I could, and sent it up to hospital. This 
morning early I went to see him, having first 
asked the doctor in charge about him. He at 
once told me he feared the worst. When I 
saw him I did not think he would recover. 
His servant was with him, who was very 
attentive to him. We gave him what med- 
ical comforts could be got, such as beef-tea 
and champagne. I stayed with him all the 
morning, until 2 p. M., and at his request I 
read and prayed by his stretcher side; he 
was then quite sensible and followed all I 
said, and repeated some of the prayers after 
me. All this time he was very weak, and 
hardly able to raise himself up, although 
his servant told me that yesterday he was 
able to stand and walk. The disease for 
some days seems to have taken hold of him. 
He passed nothing but pure blood, and when 
I first saw him was reduced almost to a skele- 
ton. About 2 p. M., having changed his shirt 
and made him as comfortable as I could, I left 



288 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

him, telling him I would come back soon. 
Some time afterwards I got a message from 
him asking me to go back, which I did, about 
5 :30 p. M. I found a Captain Cardew, one of 
the staff officers, with him. He had just read 
the fourteenth chapter of St. John to him, 
which he listened to, and asked Cardew to 
read slowly, so that he might follow. A doc- 
tor was also with him. They told me that the 
end was approaching. We all stayed with 
him till about 7 p. m.^ when he gave a little 
sigh and passed away ; he was not sensible for 
the last hour, but appeared not to suffer any 
pain. When I was with him in the morning, 
I said; * Arthur, I shall write by the post to- 
night, to tell your mother how ill you are.' 
He said: *Yes, please, Colonel, write to 
mamma.' It was at this time that he asked 
me to read to him and repeated after me the 
Lord's Prayer." 

A little more is added bj a friend and 

brother officer, Lieutenant Hntton, a 

corporal from whose company had 

helped the dying boy's servant in his 

attendance on his master. 

**The corporal at the boy's request had on 
several occasions read to him both from the 



AN ETON BOY 289 

Bible and Prayer Book, and as the corporal ex- 
pressed himself to me, he seemed always more 
peaceful and happy afterwards. His servant 
Starman was most struck by the heroic and 
resigned way in which his master bore the 
pain of his disease shortly before his death. 
Knowing the end was approaching, and seeing 
his master inclined to move, Starman got up 
and was about to smooth his pillow for him, 
when the boy, with a smile that as he said he 
will never forget, turned and whispered: 
* Hush, don 't touch me, I am going to heaven ; ' 
and so fell asleep. ' ' 

On the 26th of April, the day after 
his death, Arthur Mynors was buried 
under a mimosa-tree, on a grassy slope 
looking down to the sea over the lovely 
valley of the Tugela. On the 2nd of 
May some men of his regiment, the 60th, 
put a small rough wooden cross over 
his grave, with this inscription: — 

IN MEMORY OF 

LIEUT. MYNORS, 

3/60, 

WHO DIED APRIL 25, 1879, 

AGED 22 YEARS, 



290 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

It was a happy nature that, by the 
banks of the Tugela, passed thus early 
away — a happy and beautiful nature. 
His simple letters and diary, which we 
have been following, show him to us 
better than any admiring description. 
They show a nature fresh, wholesome, 
gay; an English boy with the tastes of 
his age and bringing up, with a keen 
love of sport, with a genuine love for 
the country, a genuine eye for it — 
Greek in his simplicity and truth of feel- 
ing, Greek in his simplicity and truth 
of touch. We see him full of natural 
affection, and not ashamed of manifest- 
ing it; bred in habits of religion, and 
not ashamed of retaining them; without 
a speck of affectation, without a shadow 
of pretension, unsullied, brave, true, 
kind, respectful, grateful, uncensorious, 
uncomplaining ; in the time to act, cheer- 
fully active ; in the time to suffer, cheer- 
fully enduring. So to his friends he 



AN ETON BOY 291 

seemed, and so their testimony shows 
him — testimony which by its affection- 
ate warmth proves the character which 
could inspire it to have been no ordi- 
Qary one. ^ ' I am sure you and anybody 
who knew him/' writes a brother of- 
ficer, '^will be grieved beyond measure 
to hear of the death of our dear Bunny 
Mynors, of dysentery. I can't tell you 
what a loss he is to us, as he was such 
a favourite with us all. He had en- 
deared himself in his short stay of a 
year with men and officers alike, more 
than is given to the lot of most of us." 
**He had all the qualities," says an- 
other, **of a good soldier and a leader 
of men, combined with a perfect temper, 
thorough unselfishness, and a genial 
cheery manner." ^^The life and soul 
of the mess," writes the adjutant of his 
battalion, himself an Etonian, **keen at 
all sports and games, and a universal 
favourite wherever we have been quar- 



292 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

tered — it seems hard to lose him. But 
when I add that in all professional mat- 
ters he was most earnest, and so keen to 
be well up in his work, strict and yet 
with a perfect manner, a favourite with 
his men, and, as all admit, the most 
promising boy Eton had sent to our 
ranks for many a day — when I add this, 
I feel that not only we who knew him, 
but all the battalion, must grieve, and 
will do so for the loss of one who prom- 
ised to be such a credit to his regiment. 
. . . The old school may well grieve 
for so fine a character as his who has 
just been taken from us. I know no 
finer fellows, or those who do their work 
so well, as those like Mynors, who never 
said an unkind word of any one, and con- 
sequently no one ever said any word ex- 
cept of praise or love for them." 
^^Such as they," to the same effect says 
his tutor, Mr. Warre, who has gained 
and kept the loving regard and trust 



AN ETON BOY 293 

of so many generations of his Eton pu- 
pils, as he gained and kept those of 
young Mynors; '^such as they have from 
others the love that they deserve.'' 

Natures so beautiful are not common ; 
and those who have seen and possessed 
the bright presence of such a boy, while 
they mourn their irreparable loss, can- 
not but think most of his rareness, his 
uniqueness. For me, a stranger, and 
speaking not to his friends but to the 
wide public, I confess that when I have 
paid my tribute of sympathy to a beauti- 
ful character and to a profound sorrow, 
it is rather to what he has in common 
with others that my thoughts are drawn, 
than to what is unique in him. The or- 
der of things in which he was brought up, 
the school system in which he was edu- 
cated, produce, not indeed many natures 
so sweet as his, but in all good natures 
many of his virtues. That school sys- 
tem is a close and narrow one; that or- 



294 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 

der of things is changing, and will 
surely pass away. Vain are endeavours 
to keep it fixed for ever, impotent are 
regrets for it; it will pass away. The 
received ideas which furnished the mind 
of Arthur Mynors, as they in general 
furnish the minds of English boys of 
his class, and which determine his and 
their intellectual vision, will change. 
But under the old order of things, and 
with its received ideas, there were bred 
great and precious virtues; it is good 
for us to rest our eyes upon them, to 
feel their value, to resolve amid all 
chances and changes to save and nourish 
them, as saved and nourished they can 
be. Our slowness of development in 
England has its excellent uses in ena- 
bling indispensable virtues to take root, 
and to make themselves felt by us to be 
indispensable. Our French neighbours 
have moved faster than we; they have 
more lucidity, in several important re- 



AN ETON BOY 295 

spects, than we have; they have fewer 
illusions. But a modern French school- 
boy, Voltairian and emancipated, read- 
ing La Fille Elisa and Nana, making it 
his pastime to play tricks on his chap- 
lain, to mock and flout him and his teach- 
ing — the production of a race of lucid 
school-boys of this kind is a dangerous 
privilege. When I lay down the memoir 
of Dr. Ealeigh I feel that, crude and 
faulty as is the type of religion offered 
by Puritanism, narrow and false as is 
its conception of human life, material- 
istic and impossible as is its world to 
come, yet the seriousness, soberness, and 
devout energy of Puritanism are a 
prize, once won, never to be lost; they 
are a possession to our race for ever. 
And in taking leave of the letters and 
diary of Arthur Mynors, I feel that this 
natural and charming boy, too, has vir- 
tues, he and others like him, which are 
part of the very tradition and life of 



296 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 

England ; which have gone to make * * the 
ancient and inbred integrity, piety, good- 
nature, and good-humour of the Eng- 
lish people,"^ and which can no more 
perish than that ideal. 

1 Burke. 



THE END 



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